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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Beat
FRUIT BARS Mix together one cupful of butter and one cupful of brown sugar until creamy, add two well-beaten eggs, one-half cupful of sour milk and scant teaspoonful of soda if the milk is thoroughly sour, if not use only half a teaspoonful. Beat up together, then add enough flour to make a dough that will roll nicely but be careful not to get it too stiff. Flour the board well, then roll out thin and cut with a narrow oblong cutter. Put through a food chopper one pound of stoned dates and one-half pound of figs. Work together and then roll in a thin sheet. Put a layer of this fruit paste between every two of the cakes in sandwich fashion. Bake in a hot oven. Marmalades or candied fruits or nut and fruit mixtures can be used for these bars.
MAPLE DROPS To a half cupful of maple syrup add one teaspoonful of melted butter, one well-beaten egg and one cup of flour sifted with a teaspoonful of baking-powder. Add a pinch of salt. Beat and drop by spoonfuls or half-spoonfuls on buttered tin, and bake in a quick oven. Cover with maple fondant.
Two small baked confections from the back of a candy book: a date-and-fig sandwich cookie and a maple drop finished with fondant. Both are written for cooks who judged dough by feel, so the flour quantities are left to you.
- Sour milk and the soda"Thoroughly sour" means naturally clabbered milk, which the recipe treats as acidic enough for the full scant teaspoon of soda. Buttermilk is the usual modern stand-in; if you sour milk quickly with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, follow the recipe's own hedge and start with the half teaspoon.
- Flour, unmeasuredExpect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for the bar dough. Stop as soon as it holds together and rolls without tearing — the warning about stiffness is the important part, since extra flour turns these hard rather than short.
- Oven temperaturesBoth "hot" and "quick" oven point to somewhere around 400-425F; period usage was loose and the two terms overlap. For thin rolled cookies, bake at the lower end and watch them; 8 to 10 minutes is usually enough for the bars and 8 to 12 for the drops.
- Stoned datesStoned means pitted. Check bought dates anyway, as one missed pit will damage a food processor blade — which is what stands in for the "food chopper" here. Pulse rather than run continuously, or the paste turns to a sticky mass that will not sheet.
- Rolling the fruit pasteDate and fig paste sticks to everything. Roll it between two sheets of parchment or waxed paper to the same thickness as the dough, then cut it with the same cutter and lift the pieces into place.
- Assembling before bakingThe bars are sandwiched raw and baked as a unit. Press the edges lightly so the two layers seal, or the fruit bubbles out at the sides.
- Maple fondantThe recipe assumes you already have some, as elsewhere in a candy book. A boiled maple fondant sets firm; if you have none, a thick glaze of maple syrup beaten with confectioners' sugar does the same job on a cooled cookie.
- YieldThe bar dough, rolled thin, gives several dozen small oblongs, i.e. a good number of sandwiches; the maple batter about two dozen small drops. The filling alone calls for a pound and a half of dried fruit, which is generous for the dough — half a batch of paste is often enough.
Date bars of this kind appear in American cookbooks in the early twentieth century, as dates and figs became more widely and cheaply available in grocery stores. The mechanical food chopper the recipe calls for was a common piece of period kitchen equipment, clamped to the table edge, and made fruit pastes easier to prepare at home than chopping or pounding by hand. Their appearance in a candy book fits the way such small sweets sat on the boundary between baking and confectionery, finished with fondant or fruit paste rather than eaten plain.