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Date Candy Loaf
1 cup milk 2 cups sugar 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup chopped nut meats 1/2 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 package Dromedary Dates Cook milk and sugar in a saucepan over fire until a little will harden in cold water, then add dates which have been stoned and cut in halves. Stir and cook until the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan.
Remove from fire, add cocoanut and nut meats and beat until it begins to firm. Pour on a wet cloth, roll into a loaf, and when cold cut into slices. د C
A boiled-sugar candy of the fudge family, stiffened with dates and shaped in a cloth rather than a pan. The original assumes a cook who can read a sugar syrup by eye, and it quietly forgets one of its own ingredients.
- The butter is never mentioned againIt appears in the ingredient list and nowhere in the method. Adding it with the milk and sugar at the start is the usual fix; the recipe itself gives no guidance.
- What the cold-water test means here"a little will harden in cold water" is a cold-water test at the firmer end of the range, but the recipe gives no temperature. The second cue, cooking until the mixture leaves the sides of the saucepan, does as much of the work; a syrup stopped too soft will give a loaf too slack to slice.
- A package of Dromedary DatesCarton sizes of the period were in the half-pound range, but the recipe does not specify and packaging varied. The recipe tells you to stone them, so they were sold with pits in.
- Dromedary CocoanutDried shredded coconut, generally moister than today's desiccated coconut. Sweetened flake works; if you use unsweetened, the candy is noticeably less cloying and no worse for it.
- Nut meatsPeriod shorthand for shelled nuts. Walnuts or pecans are the usual choice for a date candy of this kind, chopped medium so the slices hold together.
- The hinge: when to stop beatingBeat off the heat only until the gloss dulls and the mass thickens. Go further and it seizes into a crumbly block that will not roll; stop too soon and it will not hold a log shape.
- The wet clothA damp, well-wrung linen or cotton tea towel, used to keep the hot candy from sticking while it is rolled. Damp parchment or a silicone mat does the same job, but the cloth lets you compress the loaf as you roll.
- Yield and keepingNearer a pound and a half to two pounds of candy; the number of slices depends on how thick the log is rolled. Wrapped tightly, it keeps a week or more at room temperature and slices best fully cold.
Dromedary was the date and coconut brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York (no relation to the coffee firm of similar name), and like most packaged-goods makers of the era it published small recipe booklets whose purpose was to find more uses for the product. Dates arrived in America largely from Iraq and North Africa, pressed into slabs or packed in cartons, and the booklets worked hard to move them out of the fruit bowl and into cakes, breads and candy. Date loaf candy of this type — a boiled sugar-and-milk base worked with dates and nuts, rolled in a damp cloth and sliced — survives in places where it is still made at Christmas and often called date roll or date loaf. The coconut here is the brand doing its own advertising, folding a second Dromedary product into a recipe that does not strictly need it.