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Dessert

Cocoa Fruit Cookies

Cookies made with cocoa, dates, pecans, butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pecans and dates share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cocoa Fruit Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Sift the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and cinnamon together.

  3. Add the well-beaten eggs to the butter and sugar mixture.

  4. Mix in the sifted dry ingredients, then fold in the dates and pecans.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a well-greased biscuit pan.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Pecans + datestop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Cinnamon + pecanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cookies richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture as they set in the oven.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the dough to help the cookies rise and brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown and crisp at the edges.
Dates
Add chewy moisture and natural sweetness to the cookies.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter and sugar traps air in the fat, which helps the cookies rise and gives them a lighter texture. Under-creamed butter yields denser, flatter cookies.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cinnamon, sugar, egg, flour, pecans, 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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