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Dessert

Date Pudding

A baked dessert made with dates, suet, flour, milk, sugar, ginger, cinnamon, salt, eggs and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Date Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Run the dates and suet through a meat grinder.

Make and bake

  1. Mix all the ingredients together, adding the beaten eggs last.

  2. Turn the mixture into a well buttered baking dish or mold.

  3. Bake for 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a hard sauce.

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. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Dates + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Provide sweetness and moisture, giving the pudding its dense, chewy body.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it bakes.
Flour
Provides structure so the mixture sets into a sliceable pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as the pudding bakes.
Soft bread crumbs
Add bulk and soak up liquid, contributing to a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps with browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten eggs last. Mixing the eggs in at the end keeps the batter from being overworked and lets them distribute evenly before baking sets the structure.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, sugar, milk, flour, cinnamon, egg, bread. 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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