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Dessert

Date Torte

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Torte

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

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

  2. Chop the nuts and dates.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped nuts, chopped dates, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, and baking powder, and mix until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 30 minutes.

  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. Nuts + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Dates + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together470 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Bind the batter and help set the torte's structure as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the torte together after baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven, helping the torte rise and turn light.
Dates
Add sweetness and moisture, giving the torte its chewy texture.
Chopped nuts
Add crunch and texture contrast to the soft, moist crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during baking.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, sugar, egg, milk, flour. 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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