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Dessert

Currant Pancakes

Currant pancakes made with eggs, flour, milk, and sweetened with sugar, topped with currants and grated zwieback.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Currant Pancakes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs, flour, sweet milk, water, salt, and sugar until well combined.

Cook the pancakes

  1. Heat coconut oil and butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Pour the batter into the hot pan.

  3. Sprinkle the washed currants over the batter and add sugar to taste.

  4. Before flipping, sprinkle fine grated zwieback over the currants.

  5. Serve the pancakes sprinkled with additional sugar.

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. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Coconut + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the pancakes structure as they set.
Flour
Provides starch that thickens the batter and gives the pancakes body.
Sweet milk
Adds liquid to hydrate the flour and contributes moisture and tenderness.
Currants
Add tart bursts of fruit flavor and moisture within the pancake.
Zwieback
Fine crumbs absorb moisture and add a toasty, browned crust on the currant side.

The step that matters

Sprinkling zwieback before flipping. The zwieback crumbs must be added before flipping so they sit on the set top surface. Added too late they fall off, and the pancake can stick or break when turned.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, sugar, coconut, butter. 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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