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Bread Crumb Batter Cakes

A batter cake made with bread crumbs, milk, flour, sugar, baking powder, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread Crumb Batter Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg until light and add it to the milk.

  2. Stir in the bread crumbs.

  3. Sift together the flour, salt, sugar, and baking powder.

  4. Add the sifted dry ingredients to the mixture.

  5. Beat all ingredients together until well combined.

  6. If the batter becomes too stiff, add a little extra milk.

Cook

  1. Bake on a soapstone griddle, or a lightly greased ordinary griddle.

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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Egg
Binds the batter and adds richness and structure to the cakes.
Bread crumbs
Add body and a soft, tender texture to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the cakes rise and become light.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cakes together.
Sweet milk
Supplies liquid that hydrates the flour and crumbs into a batter.

The step that matters

Adding extra milk only if the batter is too stiff. Extra liquid should be added gradually, since too much thins the batter and weakens the structure that holds the cakes together. Stiffness usually means the crumbs have absorbed liquid, so a small addition is enough.

“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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