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Dessert

Strawbeert Short-cake

A layered cake made with flour, lard, butter, salt, cold water, strawberries, and sugar, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Strawbeert Short-cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. Rub the lard and butter into the flour.

  2. Add salt and mix in enough cold water to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough into thin cakes the size of a breakfast plate.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place a layer of strawberries on one cake and sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Add another cake of dough on top, followed by another layer of strawberries and sugar.

  3. Finish with a top layer of dough.

  4. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until golden.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and butter sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 cakes once mixed with liquid.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the dough short and tender.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the dough, contributing to tenderness and browning.
Strawberries
Provide fruit flavor and juice that moistens the layers between the dough.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and helps the top of the dough brown.

The step that matters

Rolling the dough thin. Thin cakes bake through and brown evenly in a slow oven. Overworking the dough after adding water develops gluten, which makes the cakes tough rather than tender.

“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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