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Sour Milk Griddle Cakes

A griddle cake made with sour milk, flour, eggs, salt, butter, and baking soda.

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 ↓

Sour Milk Griddle Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine sour milk and enough sifted flour to create a thick batter that can pour from a pitcher.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, salt, melted butter, and dissolved baking soda.

Cook

  1. Heat a greased griddle over medium-high heat.

  2. Pour batter onto the griddle and cook until browned 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to produce gas that lightens the cakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to produce carbon dioxide, helping the cakes rise.
Sifted flour
Provides the structure that sets the batter into cakes as it cooks.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping bind the batter and set during cooking.
Melted butter
Adds fat for tenderness and helps the surface brown on the griddle.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda before adding it. Baking soda must be fully dissolved so it reacts evenly with the sour milk's acid. Unevenly distributed soda can leave bitter spots or uneven rising across the cakes.

“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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