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Dessert

Cocoa Fruit Cookies

Cookies made with cocoa, dates, pecans, butter, sugar, flour, cinnamon, eggs, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pecans and dates share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cocoa Fruit Cookies

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Sift the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and cinnamon into the butter mixture.

  3. Add the well-beaten eggs, then mix in the dates and pecans.

Bake

  1. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto a well-greased baking sheet.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden.

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. Pecans + datestop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + datestop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Cinnamon + pecanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar 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

Butter
Creams with sugar to give the cookies richness and a tender texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cookies together as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the mixture to help the cookies rise and spread.
Cocoa
Adds chocolate flavour and deep colour to the cookies.
Sugar
Sweetens the dough and helps it brown while baking.

Swap the cocoa

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Cocoathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cinnamon, sugar, egg, flour, pecans, 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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