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Dessert

Short Cake

A baked pastry made from flour, butter or lard, baking soda or powder, and optional fruit filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Short Cake

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. Sift the flour and baking powder together, or sift the flour and add baking soda and salt.

  3. Mix the butter or lard thoroughly into the flour until no lumps remain.

  4. Add enough tepid water to form a nice, rather stiff dough.

  5. Roll out the dough into a thin sheet, about ½ inch thick, and lightly criss-cross with a knife in diamond shapes.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until light brown.

  2. For fruit short cake, use ¼ pound of butter and 2 beaten eggs, mixing with sour milk or buttermilk if using baking soda, or sweet milk if using baking powder.

  3. Divide the dough in two for the upper and lower crusts, and sprinkle fruits between the layers.

  4. Serve split open and buttered while hot.

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 + buttertop 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 + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Butter or lard
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and short rather than tough.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the shortcake rises and becomes light.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk or buttermilk to help the shortcake rise.
Eggs
Add richness and structure to the fruit shortcake filling layers.

The step that matters

Mix the fat thoroughly into the flour until no lumps remain. Evenly coating flour particles with fat limits gluten development, which keeps the shortcake tender and crumbly instead of tough.

“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 shortcake recipes

Strawberry 339Peach 45Orange 33Fruit 18Huckleberry 15Lemon 14 See all 56 →

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