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Dessert

Date Tort

A baked dessert made with dates, nuts, flour, eggs, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and dates work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 178 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Tort

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs and add the sugar.

  2. Mix in the chopped dates.

  3. Combine 1 tablespoon of flour with the nuts and add to the mixture.

  4. Add baking powder and flavoring, mixing well.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake very slowly until set.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Nuts + datestop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + datestop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs provide the main structure and set the tart as it bakes.
Dates
Chopped dates add sweetness, moisture and chewy texture to the tart.
Nuts
Chopped nuts add crunch and richness that contrast with the soft batter.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the batter and helps it brown lightly as it bakes.
Flour
Flour gives the batter body so it holds together rather than spreading thin.

The step that matters

Bake very slowly until set. Eggs set through gentle, even heat. Baking too hot can puff the tart quickly and then cause it to crack or turn rubbery, so keep the oven low and check that the centre is firm before removing it.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Mixed nutsfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, sugar, 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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