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Dessert

Cream Pancakes

A pancake made with egg yolks, cream, sugar, spices, fried in lard, sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cream Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the yolks of the eggs with the cream, sugar, cinnamon, mace, and nutmeg.

Fry and serve

  1. Rub a pan with lard and heat it.

  2. Pour a thin layer of batter into the pan and fry until golden.

  3. Sprinkle sugar over the pancakes before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Add richness and help the batter set and bind as it cooks.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the pancakes a tender, rich texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown as the pancakes fry.
Lard
Greases the pan so the thin batter releases cleanly and fries with a crisp edge.

The step that matters

Pour a thin layer of batter into the pan and fry until golden. A thin layer cooks through quickly and evenly. A thick pour can burn on the outside while staying raw inside. Sugar in the batter browns quickly, so the heat should be moderate and the pancake watched closely.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cream, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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