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Dessert

Date Pudding

A baked cake made with dates, flour, sugar, eggs, and walnuts, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and walnut work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 302 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Pudding

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 batter

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the sugar and eggs until well combined.

  3. Gradually add the flour, dates, and walnuts, mixing until smooth.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a cake tin with a tube and bake for 1 hour.

  2. Once cooled, break the pudding into pieces.

  3. Fold whipped cream into the pieces and spread it on top.

  4. Chill in the refrigerator until very cold.

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. Dates + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + datestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the pudding bakes and sets.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together after baking.
Dates
Add moisture and sweetness to the batter.
Walnuts
Add texture and a toasty, nutty flavor to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the baked pudding a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Let the pudding cool before breaking it up. A warm, freshly baked pudding is soft and crumbles easily. Cooling lets the structure firm up so the pieces hold their shape when folded with cream.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, flour, dates):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, dates. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More date pudding recipes

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