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Dessert

Strawberry Shortcake

A baked shortcake made with flour, milk, butter, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and topped with sliced strawberries and sugar.

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 Shortcake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the shortcake

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

  2. Sift the baking powder and baking soda into the flour and mix well.

  3. Rub the butter into the flour, then add the milk and mix until combined.

  4. Spread the dough to ¾ inch thick on baking sheets.

  5. Bake for 20 minutes until golden.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the strawberries with sugar in a bowl.

  2. Cut the shortcake in half, butter the bottom half, and spread half the strawberries on top.

  3. Place the top half of the shortcake over the strawberries and repeat with the remaining strawberries.

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. Coffee + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,202 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the shortcake as the main body of the dough.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to add tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough so the shortcake rises and becomes light.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidity in the dough to help it rise and brown.
Milk
Hydrates the flour to form a cohesive dough and adds moisture.
Strawberries
Provide fruity moisture and acidity that contrast with the rich shortcake.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juice into a syrup.

The step that matters

Bake for 20 minutes until golden. Overbaking dries the shortcake and makes it crumbly, while underbaking leaves it doughy inside. Golden colour signals that the surface sugars and starches have browned, which indicates the crumb has set.

“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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