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A French Lady's Recipe for Pancakes

A simple pancake recipe with flour, eggs, butter or oil, brandy, milk, water, and optional nutmeg and sugar dusting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

A French Lady's Recipe for Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix flour, eggs, butter or oil, brandy, salt, milk, and water in a bowl to form a paste.

  2. Let the mixture stand for three hours.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a frying pan over medium‑high heat.

  2. Pour the batter into the pan to form cakes the size of the pan.

  3. Fry until both sides are browned.

  4. Dust the pancakes with nutmeg and sugar.

  5. Fold the pancakes before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the batter as its proteins set during frying.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure as they set.
Butter or oil
Adds fat, which tenderises the pancakes and helps them brown in the pan.
Milk
Adds moisture and liquid that hydrates the flour and helps the batter brown.

The step that matters

Fry until both sides are browned. Pancakes need enough heat to brown and set on both sides. Too little heat leaves them pale and gummy, while too much browns the outside before the centre cooks through.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, butter, brandy, milk, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, butter, brandy, milk, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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