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Dessert

Date Filling

A sweet filling made from dates, sugar, and water, optionally garnished with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and nuts work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 178 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Date Filling

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and pit the dates.

Cook and cool

  1. In a saucepan, combine water and sugar; cook until the mixture thickens.

  2. Remove from heat and let cool.

Finish

  1. If desired, stir in chopped 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.

  1. Dates + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together178 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + datestop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together985 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the mixture thicken as it cooks.
Water
Dissolves the sugar and carries heat so the mixture can thicken evenly.

The step that matters

Cooking until thickened. The mixture thickens as heat evaporates water and concentrates the sugar. Stopping too early leaves the filling runny, while cooking too long makes it stiff once it cools.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, dates):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, dates. 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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