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Dessert

Short Cake

A quick butter cake made with flour, butter, milk, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt.

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 ↓

Short Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt with the flour.

  2. Rub the butter into this mixture until it resembles meal.

  3. Add the milk and stir until light and even.

  4. Work quickly and bring the dough together on a floured board.

Shape and bake

  1. Divide the dough into parts to fit your sheet pans, rolling each to ½ inch thick.

  2. Incise each cake with squares and bake until golden brown.

  3. Break the cake along the incisions and serve 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the cake tender and rubs into the flour for a crumbly texture.
Milk
Moistens the flour so the dough comes together and bakes soft.
Cream of tartar
Acidic salt that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the cake.

The step that matters

Work quickly and bring the dough together. Once the milk meets the flour and leavening, the reaction starts and gluten develops with handling. Working quickly and gently keeps the cake light and tender rather than tough and dense.

“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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