Name: Dates Stuffed with Hominy Balls
Ingredients: 100 dates; hominy balls; nuts

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 ↓

Dates Stuffed with Hominy Balls

Ingredients

100 dates
hominy balls
nuts

Directions

Prepare

Remove the pits from the dates.
Stuff each date with hominy balls and nuts.

Serve

Serve on a bed of lettuce.

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 + nutstop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together178 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Dates: Provide the sweet, soft base that holds the stuffing.
Hominy balls: Supply a starchy, chewy filling that contrasts with the soft date.
Nuts: Add crunch and a toasty, rich flavor to the filling.

“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.