Skip to main content
Main

Crumpets or Flannel Cakes

A batter of milk, egg, butter, yeast and flour is baked into small cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Crumpets or Flannel Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the milk and butter together until lukewarm.

  2. Beat the egg and add it to the milk mixture along with salt.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a batter.

  4. Add the yeast and mix well.

  5. Set the batter aside to rise until light.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a bake-iron and bake the batter like buckwheat cakes.

  2. Serve hot with butter.

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 + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + wheattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,002 recipes

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

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

Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the batter.
Egg
Adds structure and richness to the batter, helping it hold together as it cooks.
Yeast
Produces gas as it ferments, making the batter rise until light and giving crumpets their holes.
Wheat flour
Forms the batter's main structure as its proteins and starches set during cooking.
Butter
Adds fat for softness and flavour in the batter.

The step that matters

Set the batter aside to rise until light. Yeast needs time and warmth to ferment and release gas. If the batter rises too little, the crumpets will be dense and lack their characteristic holes.

“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.

More crumpets recipes

English 15Cornmeal 5Plain 4Tea 4Scotch 3 See all 49 →

You might also like

Wheat GruelWheat Gruel6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes