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Dessert

Date Cake

A baked cake made with rolled oats, flour, butter, lard, sour milk, dates, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Date Cake

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Date Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, mix the rolled oats, flour, brown sugar, butter, lard, sour milk, and baking soda until well combined.

  3. Roll the dough out quite thin.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. In a separate bowl, combine the dates, brown sugar, and hot water to make the filling.

  2. Spread the date filling between two layers of the rolled dough.

Bake and cool

  1. Bake in the preheated oven until cooked through, then let cool.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Oats + datestop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together69 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oats + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Oats + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,119 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Rolled oats
Add chewy texture and body to the dough layers.
All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the dough together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness for tenderness and flavour.
Lard
Adds fat that helps keep the dough tender and crumbly.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with baking soda to help the dough rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas for lift and browning.

The step that matters

Spread the date filling between two layers of the rolled dough. The dough should be rolled quite thin so the layers bake through evenly and the filling is not hidden under a thick crust. Thin, even layers also help the cake cook through completely.

Swap the dates

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oats, flour, sugar, butter, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against oats, flour, sugar, butter, milk. 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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