Name: Date Sandwiches
Ingredients: 1 pound raisins; 1 pound dates; ½ pound English walnuts; juice and pulp of 2 oranges; juice and pulp of 2 lemons; 1 cup sugar; ¼ teaspoon salt; buttered bread

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Date Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

Grind the raisins, dates, and walnuts together.
Add the juice and pulp of the oranges and lemons, sugar, and salt, and mix well until combined.

Assemble and serve

Spread the mixture on buttered bread.
Cut into desired shapes and serve.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Dates + walnuttop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together302 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,149 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Dates + orangetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together151 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).
Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together100 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins: Provide sweetness and a chewy, sticky body to the filling.
Dates: Add natural sweetness and a soft, paste-like texture that binds the filling.
English walnuts: Add crunch and a slightly bitter, nutty contrast to the soft fruit.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the fruit mixture hold together as a spread.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, dates, orange, lemon, sugar, bread):

Almondfits better
Chestnutfits better
Pistachiofits about as well
Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, dates, orange, lemon, sugar, bread. 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.