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To Make Good Pancakes

A batter of flour, milk, ginger, salt, eggs, fried in lard and served with sugar and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Good Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour with a little of the milk.

  2. Gradually add the remaining milk while mixing.

  3. Add grated ginger and salt.

  4. Beat the eggs well and mix them into the batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan until hot.

  2. Pour a ladleful of batter into the pan, moving it to spread evenly.

  3. Shake the pan gently while cooking.

  4. When one side is done, flip the pancake.

  5. Once cooked, place it on a dish near the fire.

  6. Repeat with the remaining batter.

  7. Before serving, sprinkle with pounded sugar and serve with lemon halves.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Forms the batter's structure as it sets during cooking.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure to the pancakes.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and makes the batter pourable and tender.
Lard
Fat for the pan that prevents sticking and browns the pancake surface.

The step that matters

Pour a ladleful of batter and spread it evenly. Batter spread unevenly cooks at different rates, leaving thick doughy areas and thin overdone edges. Moving the batter quickly gives a uniform thickness that sets and browns evenly.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, milk, egg, sugar, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, sugar, lemon. 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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