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Dessert

Date or Fig Candy

A candy made by mixing fondant with dates or figs, chilling, forming balls, and rolling in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and dates work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 217 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date or Fig Candy

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a fondant slightly stiffer than for cake dressing and flavor it with almond extract.

  2. Add the chopped dates or figs to the fondant.

  3. Chill the mixture until very cold.

  4. Mold the mixture into small balls.

  5. Roll the balls in granulated 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. Almond + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Dates + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together985 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fondant
Forms the sweet, creamy base that holds the fruit together in each piece.
Dates or figs
Add chewy texture and natural sweetness, bulking out the fondant.

The step that matters

Chill the mixture until very cold. A cold, stiff mixture holds its shape when molded into balls. If it is still soft, the balls will flatten or stick to your hands and lose their form.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar. 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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