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Dessert

Date Tart Cake

A sweet cake made with dates, powdered sugar, egg yolks, and matzo flour, finished with lemon peel and orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and cinnamon work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 283 recipes. Both carry anethole, which smells sweet, anise. The science ↓

Date Tart Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the powdered sugar with the egg yolks for at least 30 minutes.

  2. Add the finely chopped dates, maple syrup, cinnamon, grated chocolate, matzo flour, lemon peel, and orange juice.

  3. Fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites gently.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a springform pan and bake slowly.

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 + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cinnamon + chocolatetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,808 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Egg whites
Whipped whites trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure as it bakes.
Egg yolks
Yolks add richness and help bind the batter while adding moisture and flavor.
Matzo flour
Provides the dry starchy base that gives the cake body and structure.
Dates
Add natural sweetness, moisture, and a chewy texture to the cake.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily into the yolks, adding sweetness and a fine, tender crumb.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites gently. Whites are mostly air held in foam; vigorous stirring deflates them, which leads to a dense cake instead of a light, risen one.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, dates, maple syrup, cinnamon, chocolate, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pumpkinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, dates, maple syrup, cinnamon, chocolate, 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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