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Dessert

Butter Cakes for Tea

A quick batter of milk, eggs, cream, baking soda, salt, butter, and flour, cooked into thin cakes on a griddle.

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 ↓

Butter Cakes for Tea

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine milk, beaten eggs, cream, baking soda, salt, and melted butter.

  2. Gradually add sifted flour until you achieve a thick batter.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop thin rounds of batter onto a buttered pan or griddle.

  2. Turn the cakes while baking until they are browned.

  3. Serve stacked on a plate with a little butter on each.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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 during cooking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter's acidity to produce gas, helping the cakes rise and lighten.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cakes as its starches set when heated.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and keeps the batter loose enough to spread into rounds.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and helps the cakes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Turn the cakes while baking until they are browned. Cooking over heat that is too high browns the outside before the centre sets, leaving the inside raw. Cook gently until bubbles form on the surface, then flip once so both sides brown evenly.

“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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