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Dessert

Pine-apple Short-cake

A cake made with sliced pineapple, sugar, flour, butter, egg yolk, baking powder, salt, milk, served with sugar and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Pine-apple Short-cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and thinly slice the pineapple, then sprinkle liberally with ½ cup sugar and cover it.

  2. In a bowl, combine flour, butter, 2 teaspoons sugar, egg yolk, baking powder, and salt.

Make and shape the dough

  1. Add enough milk to form a very soft dough without kneading.

  2. Press the dough into a pie plate.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, split the cake, layer with the prepared pineapple, and serve with sugar and sweet 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. Pineapple + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together885 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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 dough once combined with liquid and egg.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the dough and gives a crumbly texture.
Egg yolk
Enriches the dough, adding richness and helping bind it.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the dough so it bakes up light.
Pineapple
Provides juicy, acidic fruit flavour that contrasts with the sweet dough.

The step that matters

Add only enough milk for a very soft dough. Too much liquid makes the dough slack and sticky, while too little leaves it dry and dense. Mixing without kneading keeps gluten development low, so the shortcake stays tender rather than tough.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter, egg, milk, 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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