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Dessert

Peach Short Cake

A baked dessert of shortbread crusts layered with peaches and whipped cream.

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

Peach 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. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, butter, and salt.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and enough milk to form a soft dough.

  4. Roll out the dough to fit a high pan and split it with a hot knife.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread butter on the bottom crust and layer with quartered peaches.

  2. Dust with pulverized sugar and place the second crust on top.

  3. Spread whipped cream over the top and add halved, pared peaches.

  4. Dust with more pulverized sugar before serving.

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 + 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. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough so the shortcake holds its shape.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the heated dough, helping it rise and turn light.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and rich.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure.
Peaches
Provide sweetness, juiciness and fruit flavor between and on top of the crusts.

The step that matters

Splitting the hot crust. Splitting the dough while it is still hot, after baking, lets the steam escape and keeps the layers from sticking together, so the crust separates cleanly for layering.

Swap the peach

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, milk, sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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