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Dessert

Cream Dates

Dates stuffed with cream and coated in sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and walnut 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 ↓

Cream Dates

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the stones from the fresh California dates.

  2. Fill the center of the dates with the cream.

  3. Drop the filled dates into 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 + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Cream + walnuttop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

  5. Walnut + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh california dates
Provide the sweet, soft fruit that forms the body of each piece.
Cream
Acts as a smooth, rich filling that contrasts with the chewy dates.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and forms a dry coating on the outside of each date.

Swap the walnut

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, cream, 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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