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Dessert

Date Cake

A sweet cake made with dates, walnuts, sugar, eggs, flour, and baking powder.

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

Why it works: Walnut and dates 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 Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Remove stones from the dates and leave them whole.

  2. Add the walnut halves and sift the sugar over the mixture.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and mix them with the dates, nuts, and sugar.

  2. Beat the egg whites and fold them into the mixture.

  3. Sift the flour with the baking powder and mix thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Line two bread tins with buttered wax paper, pour in the mixture, and bake for 45 minutes at 300°F (150°C).

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Walnut + datestop 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. Egg + flourtop 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).

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
Egg yolks bind the batter and whites, folded in, lighten its structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Flour
Provides starch and gluten that set during baking, giving the cake its structure.
Dates
Add moisture and natural sweetness, keeping the cake soft and rich.
Walnut halves
Add fat, texture and a nutty flavour to the crumb.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped egg whites hold air that makes the cake light. Stirring them in vigorously knocks that air out, so fold gently with a spatula until just blended.

Swap the walnut

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

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

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