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Dessert

Strawberry Short Cake

A baked cake made with flour, baking powder, shortening, salt, milk, strawberries, sugar, butter, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Strawberry 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 baking powder into the flour.

  3. Rub in the shortening and salt.

  4. Add sweet milk to make a soft dough.

  5. Roll out the dough and bake on a pie pan until golden.

Assemble and serve

  1. Once baked, split the cake and spread butter on both halves.

  2. Prepare the strawberries and divide them between the middle and top of the cake.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar over the strawberries.

  4. Serve with additional sugar and cream.

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

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

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

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

  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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cake once mixed with liquid and baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the cake rise and become light.
Shortening
Coats flour particles and adds tenderness to the crumb.
Strawberries
Add moisture, tartness and fresh fruit flavor between and on top of the cake.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and softens their tartness.

The step that matters

Rub in the shortening and salt. Shortening must be worked into the flour until evenly distributed in small pieces. Unevenly mixed fat leaves dense or greasy spots, while overworking the dough develops gluten and toughens the cake.

“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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