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Dessert

Date Bars

A baked dessert bar made with dates, nuts, flour, eggs, sugar, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and nuts work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 178 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Bars

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).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks and sugar until creamy.

  2. Sift the baking powder with the flour.

  3. Add the chopped nuts and dates to the flour mixture.

  4. Gradually beat the flour mixture into the yolks.

  5. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

  6. Pour the batter into a flat ungreased pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until golden, then cool.

  2. Cut into bars and spread with plain frosting or powdered sugar.

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 + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 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. Flour + datestop 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
Whites beaten and folded in add lift and an airy, tender crumb; yolks add richness.
Pastry flour
Provides the structure that holds the bars together as they bake.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the bars rise and stay light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps create a creamy, tender texture when beaten with the yolks.
Dates
Add moisture and natural sweetness, keeping the bars soft and chewy.
Nuts
Add crunch and a toasty flavour that contrasts with the soft batter.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites hold air bubbles that give the batter its lift. Stirring them in vigorously or letting them deflate before baking will leave the bars dense and flat.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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