Name: Ground Dates
Ingredients: dates; rye nuts; orange juice; lettuce; bananas; nuts

Why it works: Rye and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Ground Dates

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the stones from the dates.
Mix the dates with rye nuts or orange juice.
Serve the mixture with lettuce and sliced bananas or nuts.

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.

Rye + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together23 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Dates + bananatop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together61 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Nuts + lettucetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together174 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Dates + orangetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together151 recipes

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

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dates, rye, orange, lettuce, banana):

Almondfits better
Chestnutfits better
Walnutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, rye, orange, lettuce, banana. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.