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Dessert

Date Pie

A pie made with dates, milk, and eggs baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and dates work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Date Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil the dates in the milk.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove date skins.

  3. Beat the eggs and mix them into the strained date and milk mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake until set.

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 + datestop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Dates + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides the liquid base that softens the dates and forms the custard body.
Dates
Supply sweetness and flavor, and thicken the filling as they break down.
Eggs
Set the custard when baked, giving the filling structure and body.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with heat. Underbaking leaves a runny filling, while overbaking can make it weep or crack, so watch for a set center.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg. 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.

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