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Dessert

Date Pudding

A baked pudding made with dates, walnuts, breadcrumbs, sugar, eggs, baking powder, served with whipped cream.

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

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

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, sugar, and baking powder.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and set aside.

  4. In another bowl, beat the egg yolks and add nuts and dates.

  5. Fold the egg whites into the mixture gently.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a greased layer tin and bake for 15 minutes.

  2. Break up the pudding and serve in glasses topped 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Walnut + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together714 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites are whipped to add lightness and rise, while yolks bind the batter.
Dates
Provide sweetness and moist, chewy texture in the finished pudding.
Walnuts
Add crunch and a nutty flavor that contrasts with the soft pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize its crumb.
Bread crumbs
Lend body and help absorb moisture so the pudding holds together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking to give the pudding lift.

The step that matters

Fold the egg whites into the mixture gently. Whipped egg whites trap air that gives the pudding its lift. Vigorous stirring knocks that air out, leaving a dense, flat result.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, bread, sugar, egg, cream. 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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