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Dessert

Buttermilk Cakes

A quick batter of flour, buttermilk, baking soda, and salt, fried like pancakes and served hot with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,721 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Buttermilk Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt.

  2. Add the baking soda to the buttermilk and mix it into the flour gradually.

  3. Beat the mixture well until smooth.

Cook and serve

  1. Fry the batter like pancakes and serve hot with plenty of butter.

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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Buttermilk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lighten the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to produce gas, helping the pancakes rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter as the pancakes cook.

The step that matters

Mix the baking soda into the buttermilk and flour gradually. Baking soda reacts with the acid in buttermilk right away, so the gas bubbles that lighten the pancakes start forming before cooking. Adding it gradually and beating only until smooth keeps the batter from being overworked, which would make the pancakes tough.

“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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