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Bread

Wheat Cakes

A quick batter of sour milk, eggs, baking soda, salt, and flour is fried into thin cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wheat Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk, baking soda, salt, and eggs.

  2. Add enough flour to create a thin batter.

Cook

  1. Heat a pan and pour in the batter.

  2. Fry quickly until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Milk and flour 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

Sour milk
Provides acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lighten the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acidity to release gas, helping the cakes rise.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter hold together in the pan.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter, giving the cakes their structure once cooked.

The step that matters

Fry quickly until golden brown. Cooking over steady heat sets the outside while the inside cooks through. Too little heat leaves the cakes pale and soggy, while too much browns the outside before the centre sets.

“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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