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Pancakes with Currants

A batter of wheatmeal, milk, and eggs is folded with currants and fried into thin pancakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pancakes with Currants

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the wheatmeal, milk, and eggs to make a batter.

  2. Pick and wash the currants, then fold them into the batter.

Fry the pancakes

  1. Heat butter in a skillet and pour in the batter to fry thin pancakes.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Currant + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Cinnamon + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

Wheatmeal
Provides the flour structure that holds the batter together as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pancakes as they cook.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter so it spreads into thin pancakes.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pancakes.
Butter
Fats the skillet so the pancakes brown evenly and release cleanly.

The step that matters

Frying the thin pancakes. The skillet must be hot and lightly coated with butter. If it is too cool, the batter soaks up fat and sticks, and the pancakes cook pale and soggy instead of setting and browning.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, cinnamon, butter. 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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