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Breakfast

Pancakes, Plain

A simple batter of milk, eggs, flour, salt, and sugar cooked into pancakes, served with lime wedges.

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, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Whisk the milk, eggs, flour, salt, and sugar together in a bowl until smooth.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and grease it with a buttered cloth.

  2. Pour a small amount of batter into the pan, tilting to spread evenly.

  3. Cook until bubbles form on the surface.

  4. Flip and cook until golden.

Serve

  1. Serve the pancakes rolled or folded, dusted with sugar, and with lime wedges.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + limetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,381 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness to the cooked pancakes.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten network that gives the pancakes their body.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and adds moisture and tenderness to the batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown to a golden color.

The step that matters

Cook until bubbles form before flipping. Bubbles appear as steam escapes and the batter sets around them. Flipping earlier tears the pancake and leaves the centre raw and wet.

Swap the lime

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

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

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