Skip to main content
Main

Date Sandwiches

A sandwich with a sweet date spread, lemon, nuts, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Date Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the date filling

  1. Mince the dates finely.

  2. Add a little water and cook in a double boiler until soft and pasty.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Cool the date mixture and spread it on thinly cut bread.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped hickory nuts and cover with buttered bread.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Bread + nutstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Fine turkish dates
Cooked down to a soft paste, they provide the sweetness and body of the filling.
Lemon juice
A small amount of acidity brightens the sweetness of the dates.
Hickory nuts
Chopped nuts add crunch that contrasts with the soft date paste.
Butter
A buttered layer adds fat and richness and helps shield the bread from the moist filling.

The step that matters

Cool the date mixture before spreading. A hot date paste softens the bread and can make the sandwich soggy. Cooling lets the paste thicken so it stays in place and the bread keeps its texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dates, bread, nuts, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, bread, nuts, butter. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes