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Dessert

Date Pie

A pastry filled with dates, lemon, sugar, and milk, baked to a golden crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Date Pie

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 the filling

  1. Stone the dates and cut them into small pieces.

  2. In a bowl, combine the dates with the lemon juice, grated lemon rind, sugar, and milk to soften the dates.

Assemble and bake

  1. Fill a pie crust with the date mixture.

  2. Sprinkle lightly with flour.

  3. Dot with small pieces of butter.

  4. Cover with an upper crust.

  5. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Stoned dates
Provide the sweet, soft body of the filling that the pie is built around.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the sweetness of the dates.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the filling brown during baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the dates into a spreadable filling.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the top crust brown.

The step that matters

Softening the dates in the bowl. Dates need enough moisture to soften evenly before baking. Cut pieces mixed with lemon juice, sugar and milk break down into a smooth, spreadable filling; unsoftened pieces stay firm and uneven in the baked pie.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Datesthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, milk, flour, butter. 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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