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Dessert

Strawberry Short-cake

A layered cake made with cream or sour milk dough, butter, and ripe strawberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter 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

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.

Make the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine cream or sour milk, salt, and baking soda.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a soft dough.

  4. Roll out the dough into three circles.

  5. Spread butter on top of each circle and stack them.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake until golden brown, then separate the layers.

  2. Butter the first layer and top with strawberries.

  3. Butter the second layer and place it crust-side down over the first.

  4. Add more strawberries on top of the second layer.

  5. Cover with the third layer and bake for a few minutes.

  6. Serve hot with 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 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).

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

Cream or sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the dough.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in cream or sour milk to produce gas that lightens the dough.
Butter
Adds fat that separates the layers and gives a tender, rich texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together when rolled and baked.
Strawberries
Add natural sweetness, juice and fresh flavour between the layers.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juice to moisten the shortcake.

The step that matters

Baking the stacked layers. Butter must be spread between the rolled circles so they separate when baked. Baking the layers separately first lets them brown evenly and keeps them from steaming into a dense mass.

“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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