Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Short Cake

A cake made with oranges, flour, lard, butter, sour milk, and a citrus sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Short Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

  1. Peel the oranges and place them in a cold spot.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour, lard, and butter until well combined. Add the sour milk to form a dough.

  3. Roll the dough out to about 1 inch thick and place it in a well-buttered pan.

Bake and assemble

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until light brown.

  2. Remove from the pan and cut the cake in half like a biscuit.

  3. Layer the thinly sliced oranges and sprinkle with sugar between the cake halves. Top with the remaining oranges and cover with more sugar before serving.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil the juice of 3 oranges and 2 lemons in 1 pint of water, adding sugar and nutmeg to taste.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Prepared flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Sour milk
Moistens the flour and forms the dough, with its acidity tenderizing the crumb.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the cake tender and short in texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor, and helps the cake brown lightly in the oven.
Oranges
Provide juicy fruit and bright acidity between the cake layers.

The step that matters

Bake until light brown. Baking must be done in a preheated oven until the surface is light brown, so the cake sets fully inside while staying tender. Underbaking leaves a gummy, doughy center, and overbaking dries the crumb.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, milk, sugar, lemon, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes