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Dessert

Short Cakes

A simple dough of butter, flour, and water rolled into sheets, cut into cakes, and served hot with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Short Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Cut the butter into the flour and rub until thoroughly mixed.

  2. Add cold water to form a dough.

  3. Roll the dough out into sheets.

Cut and serve

  1. Cut the cakes with a cutter or tumbler.

  2. Serve them hot, split open, and spread with butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Rubbed into the flour to add richness and a tender, flaky texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once combined with water.
Cold water
Binds the flour and butter into a dough that holds together when rolled.

The step that matters

Rubbing the butter into the flour. Butter must be cut in until evenly mixed so it coats the flour particles. Pieces left large or unevenly distributed can cause uneven texture and greasy or tough spots in the baked cakes.

“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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