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Dessert

Cream Short-cakes

A quick sour cream cake made with flour, salt, baking soda, and boiling water, cooked 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 the dough

  1. Combine flour and salt in a bowl.

  2. Dissolve baking soda in boiling water, then add to sour cream.

  3. Quickly mix the sour cream mixture into the flour; do not let it sit.

  4. Shape dough into cakes the size of a saucer, about 1 inch thick.

  5. If dough is too dry, add a little more sour cream.

Cook on the griddle

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

  2. Brown one side, then flip 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 acidity, giving the dough tenderness and a tangy flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas, helping the cakes rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Mix the sour cream mixture into the flour quickly. Baking soda starts reacting as soon as it meets the acidic sour cream. If the dough sits, that gas escapes before baking, so the cakes rise less and turn out denser.

“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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