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Dessert

Date Filling

A sweet filling made by cooking dates with water and sugar, optionally mixed 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 remove the pits from the dates.

Cook the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine the dates, water, and sugar.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the mixture thickens.

  3. Allow to cool before using.

  4. Optionally, 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. Dates + sugartop 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

Dates
Provide the main body, sweetness and bulk of the filling as they soften and break down.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cooked filling a smooth, spreadable body.
Water
Softens the dates and loosens the mixture so it cooks evenly before thickening.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat until the mixture thickens. Cooking gently lets the dates soften and release their starch and pectin slowly, so the filling thickens evenly without scorching on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the nuts

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against dates, sugar. 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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