Name: Strawberry Short-cake
Ingredients: 1 quart sifted flour; 1 tablespoon lard; 1 tablespoon butter; ¼ teaspoon salt; cold water; 2 cups strawberries, sliced; ¼ cup sugar; additional sugar for serving; butter sauce for serving

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Strawberry Short-cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).
In a bowl, rub together the lard and butter with the flour.
Add salt and enough cold water to form a dough.
Roll out the dough into thin cakes, about the size of a breakfast plate.

Assemble and bake

Place a layer of strawberries on one cake and sprinkle with sugar.
Add another cake of dough on top, followed by another layer of strawberries and sugar.
Top with a final layer of dough.
Bake in the oven until golden brown.

Serve

Serve warm with additional sugar and butter sauce.

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.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,147 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together15,338 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 dough cakes once bound with water.
Lard and butter: Fat rubbed into flour to tenderize the dough and keep it flaky.
Strawberries: Provide fruit filling and moisture between the dough layers.
Sugar: Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juices.

“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.