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Dessert

Cream Short-cakes

A quick, lightly leavened cake made with flour, sour cream, baking soda, and water, baked on a greased griddle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Cream Short-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat a griddle over medium heat.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour and salt.

Make the dough

  1. Dissolve the baking soda in boiling water and add it to the sour cream.

  2. Quickly combine the sour cream mixture with the flour.

  3. Form the dough into cakes the size of a saucer and 1 inch thick.

Cook

  1. Grease the griddle with fat and place the cakes on it.

  2. Brown one side, then turn and brown the other side.

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. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cakes together as they cook.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and richness, and its acidity reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas that leavens the cakes.

The step that matters

Combine the sour cream mixture with the flour quickly. Once the baking soda meets the acidic sour cream, it starts releasing carbon dioxide. Mixing quickly keeps that gas in the dough so the cakes rise rather than going flat.

“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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