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Dessert

Date Pudding

A baked pudding made with eggs, dates, walnuts, bread crumbs, sugar, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and walnut work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 302 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Pudding

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. In a bowl, combine the beaten egg yolks, sugar, and salt.

  3. Fold in the chopped dates and walnuts.

  4. In another bowl, mix the bread crumbs with baking powder.

  5. Combine the two mixtures gently.

Bake and serve

  1. In a buttered dish, pour the mixture and place it in a pan of water.

  2. Bake for about 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with whipped cream or your preferred sauce.

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. Dates + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dates + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks bind the batter and give the pudding its set structure as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking to lighten the pudding's texture.
Dates
Add moisture and natural sweetness, along with a chewy texture.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor that contrasts the soft body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps tenderize the texture of the pudding.

The step that matters

Combine the two mixtures gently. Folding rather than beating keeps the air introduced by the egg and leavening intact, so the pudding rises lightly instead of turning dense.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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

More date pudding recipes

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