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Dessert

Strawberry Short-cake

A cake made with wild strawberries, flour, butter, lard, milk, and baked, then split and layered with strawberries and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 Short-cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. In a bowl, sift together flour, cream of tartar, and salt. Rub in butter and lard until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

  3. Dissolve baking soda in milk and mix into the flour mixture.

Bake and assemble

  1. Roll out the dough to ½ inch thick and bake for 15-20 minutes.

  2. Split the cake in half as soon as it comes out of the oven.

  3. Butter both halves and spread strawberries on the bottom half. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and place the top half on the berries.

  4. Serve with rich cream.

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. Cream + buttertop 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as the dough sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness by coating flour and keeping the crumb short.
Lard
Adds tenderness to the crumb by coating flour particles and limiting gluten development.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar and milk to produce gas that lifts the cake.
Cream of tartar
Provides acidity that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Wild strawberries
Add juicy sweetness and a bright acidic aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Split the cake as soon as it comes out of the oven. Splitting while the cake is hot lets steam escape and keeps the crumb from becoming dense and gummy. Letting it cool fully makes it much harder to split cleanly.

“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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