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Dessert

Strawberry Short Cake

A layered cake made with flour, lard, baking powder, milk, strawberries, butter, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

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.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, rub 5 ounces of lard into 1 quart of flour with a pinch of salt and 3 tablespoons of baking powder.

  3. Gradually add enough milk to form a soft dough.

  4. Divide the dough into 4 parts and roll out the first part lightly.

Layer and bake

  1. Cover a straight-sided cake tin with the rolled dough.

  2. Roll out a second part and place it on top of the first.

  3. Repeat with the remaining two parts using another baking tin.

  4. Bake until golden brown.

Fill and serve

  1. While hot, lift the top part from each pan, butter the inner surfaces, and fill with a 1-inch thick layer of mashed and sweetened strawberries.

  2. Serve immediately 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. Milk + buttertop 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Lard
Rubbed into the flour to create a tender, flaky texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the dough rises and becomes light.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and binds the dough into a soft, workable mass.
Fresh strawberries
Provide moisture, sweetness and fruit flavour as the filling.

The step that matters

Lift the hot layers and butter them before filling. The shortcake layers must be hot so the butter melts into them and they stay tender; if they cool, they firm up and become hard to separate cleanly.

“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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