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Sour Milk Batter Cakes

A quick fried batter made from sour milk, eggs, flour, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Sour Milk Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

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

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

Cook

  1. Heat a skillet and fry the batter 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
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to produce gas, so the pancakes rise and turn tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in sour milk to release carbon dioxide, leavening the batter.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the batter hold together while cooking.
Flour
Forms the body of the batter, giving the pancakes their structure as it sets in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying quickly over heat. The leavening from sour milk and baking soda starts working as soon as the batter is mixed, so it should go into a hot skillet promptly. Cooking too slowly lets the gas escape and the pancakes come out flat and dense.

“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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