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Dessert

Date Pudding

A baked dessert made with dates, walnuts, brown sugar, flour, baking powder, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

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

  2. In a bowl, combine chopped dates, chopped walnuts, brown sugar, flour, and baking powder.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites last.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.

  2. Bake for 20 minutes.

  3. Cut into squares and serve with whipped 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. Dates + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + flourtop 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Dates + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg 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

Dates
Add sweetness and moisture, giving the pudding a soft, chewy body.
English walnuts
Add texture and a slight crunch against the soft batter.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the pudding stay chewy and tender.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the pudding rise and lighten.
Eggs
Whites trap air and set during baking, adding structure and lift.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites last. Beaten egg whites hold air that helps the pudding rise. Stirring them in gently and briefly keeps that air, while overmixing deflates them and leaves a denser result.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, sugar, flour, 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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