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Dessert

Egoless Shortcake

A shortcake made without eggs, using milk, baking powder, butter, sugar, flour, topped with berries and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Egoless Shortcake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Dissolve the sugar in the milk.

  3. In a bowl, mix the milk with baking powder and butter.

  4. Add flour gradually to form a soft dough.

  5. Roll out the dough to a thickness that is not too thin.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the dough in a cake pan and bake until golden.

  2. Let the cake cool, then slice it in half.

  3. Fill the center with sweetened berries and top with whipped cream before serving.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, so the shortcake rises and turns light and tender.
Milk
Provides the liquid that hydrates the flour and forms the soft dough.
Butter
Adds fat that softens the crumb and gives a richer, tender texture.
Flour
Forms the structure of the dough as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps the crust brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Roll out the dough to a thickness that is not too thin. Baking powder needs enough dough depth to trap rising gas. A dough rolled too thin can bake dry and flat instead of tender and risen.

“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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