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Dessert

Strawberry Shortcake

A simple baked cake made from butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and milk, then sliced and topped with filling.

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

Strawberry Shortcake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Rub the butter into the flour in a mixing bowl.

  3. Add the sugar, baking powder, and salt, then mix well.

  4. Stir in the milk to form a stiff batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a baking dish and bake for 20 minutes.

  2. Once baked, cut the cake into two layers and spread with your choice of filling.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Butter
Adds fat that keeps the crumb tender and helps create a short, crumbly texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake once the batter sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the cake rise and become light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the ingredients into a batter with moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to gentle browning of the cake's surface.

The step that matters

Rubbing the butter into the flour. Butter should be rubbed in until the mixture looks like fine crumbs. Pieces left too large create uneven texture, while overworking can make the cake tough once gluten develops with liquid.

“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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