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Dessert

Date Tart Cake

A sweet cake made with dates, powdered sugar, egg yolks, spices, chocolate, matzo flour, lemon peel, orange juice, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Date Tart Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the powdered sugar with the egg yolks for at least 30 minutes.

  2. Add the finely chopped dates, allspice, cinnamon, grated chocolate, and sifted matzo flour.

  3. Mix in the grated lemon peel and orange juice.

  4. Gently fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Bake in a springform pan at 300°F (150°C) until set.

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. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Dates + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Add richness and moisture, and help set the batter as it bakes.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the batter and give the cake its rise.
Matzo flour
Provides the starchy structure that holds the cake together.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and, beaten with the yolks, helps create a fine, tender crumb.
Dates
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air only while whipped. Folding gently keeps that air in the batter; stirring vigorously deflates it, leading to a denser, flatter cake.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, dates, allspice, cinnamon, chocolate, 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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