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Dessert

Strawberry Shortcake

A baked cake made from flour, butter, baking soda, and cream of tartar, topped with strawberries, sugar, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 Shortcake

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 shortcake

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

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, butter, cream of tartar, baking soda, and salt.

  3. Add sweet milk gradually to form a soft dough.

  4. Roll out the dough to half an inch thick and place in a shallow pan.

  5. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until golden.

Assemble and serve

  1. Slice the cake in half and layer half the strawberries in between.

  2. Sprinkle with white sugar and cream, then add the remaining strawberries on top.

  3. Cover with more sugar and cream, and serve immediately.

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 + milktop 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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 cake once mixed with liquid and baked.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and enriches the dough.
Cream of tartar
Acidic ingredient that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Baking soda
Produces carbon dioxide with the acid, leavening the dough as it bakes.
Strawberries
Provide fresh fruit flavor, juiciness and acidity between the cake layers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws juice from the strawberries to make a syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the sweet milk. Adding the liquid gradually lets you stop once the dough is soft. Too much liquid makes the dough sticky and tough, while too little leaves the cake dry and crumbly.

“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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