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Dessert

Strawberry Short-cake

A layered cake of short crust, strawberries, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Strawberry Short-cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crust

  1. Make a rich short crust by mixing butter and flour, using 1 ounce more flour than butter.

  2. Bake in flat tins until the pastry is about 1 inch thick.

Assemble

  1. Open the short-cake and butter it well.

  2. Cover one half with a layer of strawberries mixed with sugar.

  3. Add alternate layers of berries and pastry, finishing with strawberries on top.

  4. Spread a layer of whipped cream over the strawberries.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Enriches the short crust and keeps the pastry tender and crumbly.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pastry together after baking.
Strawberries
Add moisture and fresh, sweet-tart flavour between the pastry layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juices.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a soft, cool topping that contrasts with the pastry.

The step that matters

Make the rich short crust. The butter must be worked into the flour so the pastry stays short and crumbly rather than tough. Too much mixing or overworking develops gluten, making the crust 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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