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Dessert

Peach Short Cake

A baked cake with butter, sugar, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, egg, topped with sliced sugared peaches.

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

Peach 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.

Make the batter

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

  2. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the egg and mix well.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until combined.

  6. Pour the batter into round cake tins.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

  2. Once baked, divide the cake, spread butter on each layer, and top with sliced, sugared peaches.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + peachtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together860 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a golden brown crust.
Egg
Binds the batter and adds structure to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter and works with baking soda to help it rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to produce gas for rising.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding dry ingredients in portions and stirring until just combined keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cake tough.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

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