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Breakfast

Pancakes

A simple batter of eggs, flour, milk, nutmeg, salt, and butter cooked in a pan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Pancakes

Why it works: Nutmeg and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,230 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs with nutmeg and salt in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add flour and a little milk, mixing until smooth.

  3. Add enough milk to achieve a batter consistency similar to good cream.

Fry the pancakes

  1. Heat a clean frying pan and add a walnut-sized piece of butter.

  2. Once melted, pour in enough batter to cover the bottom of the pan.

  3. Fry until light brown on both sides.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Nutmeg + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 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 as they set in the pan.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the pancakes their body.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and thins the batter to a pourable, creamy consistency.
Butter
Greases the pan and adds richness and browning to the surface.

The step that matters

Adding the milk gradually. Adding liquid slowly while mixing prevents lumps forming in the flour. Smooth, evenly hydrated batter then spreads and cooks evenly instead of producing dry or clumpy pancakes.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, nutmeg, flour, milk, 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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Buckwheat 148Rice 104French 71Cornmeal 65Potato 62Cream 36 See all 241 →

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