Name: Chopped Dates, with Oatmeal
Ingredients: 1 cup oatmeal; ½ cup chopped dates; cream (to serve)

Why it works: Dates and cream work together. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 276 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Chopped Dates, with Oatmeal

Ingredients

1 cup oatmeal
½ cup chopped dates
cream (to serve)

Directions

Prepare the dates

Stone the dates and cut them into small pieces.
Place the chopped dates in a bowl.

Assemble and serve

Pour hot oatmeal over the dates.
Let it sit until ready to serve, allowing the dates to flavor the oatmeal.
Serve with cream.

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.

Dates + creamtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together276 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Oatmeal: Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the hot liquid to become soft and creamy.
Dates: Add natural sweetness, chewy texture and a caramel-like flavor as they soften.

“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.