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Dessert

Strawberry Short Cake

A layered cake made with sour milk or cream, strawberries, sugar, and sweet cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Strawberry Short Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the cake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Make a short cake using sour milk or cream, shaped like a dinner plate.

  3. Bake the cake until golden, then let it cool.

  4. Slice the cake in half horizontally.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mash the strawberries and mix with sweet cream and sugar.

  2. Spread the strawberry mixture on the bottom half of the cake.

  3. Place the top half of the cake over the strawberries.

  4. Let it stand for 1 hour before cutting into wedges and 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sour milk or cream
Its acidity tenderizes the short cake and reacts with leavening for lift.
Strawberries
Provide the fruity flavor and juicy moisture that soaks into the cake layers.
White sugar
Sweetens the berries and helps draw out their juices into a syrup.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and fat, giving a soft, creamy filling against the cake.

The step that matters

Let it stand for 1 hour before cutting. Resting lets the strawberry juices soak into the cake layers, so the cake softens and the filling sets. Cutting early can leave it runny and messy.

“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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