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Dessert

Strawberry Short-Cake

A layered cake made with flour, butter, baking powder, milk or water, topped with strawberries, sugar, and sweetened cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

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. In a bowl, mix flour and baking powder.

  3. Cut in butter until crumbly.

  4. Add milk or water gradually to form a soft dough.

  5. Divide the dough into two or three equal parts.

  6. Roll out to fit your baking tin.

Layer and bake

  1. Place each layer in the tin.

  2. Spread melted butter between them, but not on the last layer.

  3. Bake until golden and the layers separate easily.

Fill and serve

  1. Spread strawberries and sugar on each layer.

  2. Add the top crust.

  3. Pour any remaining juice over the top.

  4. Serve with sweetened 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. 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. 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the layers rise and turn light.
Butter
Cut into the flour for a crumbly, tender texture, and spread between layers for richness.
Strawberries
Add fruity flavor and juice that soaks into the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and helps draw out their juice.

The step that matters

Bake until golden and the layers separate easily. Underbaked layers stay gummy and stick together, while overbaking dries them out. Golden color signals that the starches have set and the surface has browned.

“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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