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Sour Milk Hot Cakes

A batter of sour milk, bread, baking soda, and flour cooked on a griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Sour Milk Hot Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Combine sour milk and bread in a bowl and let it sit overnight.

  2. In the morning, dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water and stir it into the sour milk and bread mixture.

  3. Add enough flour to create a thin batter.

Cook

  1. Drop tablespoons of the batter onto a hot griddle and cook 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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce carbon dioxide, lightening the pancakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release gas, helping the pancakes rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets as the pancakes cook.
Bread
Soaks up liquid and softens overnight, adding body to the batter.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda and stirring it in. Baking soda must be fully dissolved so it reacts evenly with the sour milk. Clumps leave pockets of bitter residue and uneven rising.

“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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