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Date Pudding
Clean, stone, and chop 1 pound dates, add 1 cup English walnut meats, broken in pieces, 1/2 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Beat up 4 egg whites to stiff froth, then fold in 1/2 cup sugar, add beaten egg yolks, 1/2 tablespoon melted Crisco and date mixture. Turn into Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven 30 minutes. Cut in squares and serve cold with whipped cream.
A date-and-walnut torte in all but name — barely half a cup of flour and half a tablespoon of fat holding together a pound of fruit and a cup of nuts. The eggs do the structural work, so how you treat them decides whether it rises or sits flat.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F; period sources put a moderate oven anywhere from 350 to 375F. Thirty minutes suits a thin sheet in a square tin of about 8 or 9 inches, though the recipe does not say what size tin to use; the top should be dry and springy and a tester should come out with no wet batter.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and melted butter or a neutral oil is a straight substitute at the same tiny quantity — half a tablespoon is there for the pan and for tenderness, not for flavour.
- "Criscoed tin"Greased pan. Line it with parchment as well: this batter is mostly sugar and fruit and will stick where a plainer cake would not.
- The folding orderThe instruction as written — whites to stiff froth, then fold in the sugar — will deflate them somewhat. For a better rise, beat the whites to soft peaks, add the sugar in a stream and beat to stiff glossy peaks, then fold in yolks, fat and fruit.
- Flour the fruitToss the chopped dates and walnuts with the half cup of flour, baking powder and salt before they go in. Coated fruit disperses instead of sinking into a solid layer, and the sticky dates stop clumping.
- DatesA pound of whole dates yields roughly 14 oz stoned, about 2 1/2 cups chopped. Modern pitted dates skip the stoning step; if they are dry, a short soak in hot water and a thorough drain helps.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut of any supermarket (the Persian or common walnut); the "English" is usually explained by the English ships that carried them in trade, and in American cookbooks it served to distinguish them from the native black walnut, which is stronger and would dominate the dates.
- Yield and servingAbout 16 squares from an 8-inch pan. Cool completely in the tin before cutting — warm, it tears; cold, it firms into something between a pudding and a bar.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911, and the shortening's appearance in a recipe that needs almost no fat at all shows how thoroughly the book was built around its sponsor. Date-and-nut puddings and cakes proliferated in American cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, as packed dates imported from North Africa and the Persian Gulf — and, from around the 1910s and 1920s, grown commercially in California's Coachella Valley — became a cheap and reliably sweet pantry fruit. The result is closer to a flourless torte than to a steamed English pudding, which is why it is served cold, in squares, with cream.