Name: Iced Dates
Ingredients: Dates (stoned); 1 tablespoon water; Icing sugar (sufficient to make a stiff paste)

Why it works: Dates and sugar work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 985 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Iced Dates

Ingredients

Dates (stoned)
1 tablespoon water
Icing sugar (sufficient to make a stiff paste)

Directions

Prepare

Beat the water and icing sugar together until well mixed.
Remove the stones from the dates.

Fill and finish

Fill the centers of the dates with the icing mixture.
Optionally color the icing pink with a little cochineal.

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.

Dates + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together985 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dates: Provide the soft, sweet base that holds the icing filling.
Icing sugar: Adds sweetness and, mixed with water, forms a stiff paste for filling.

“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.