Home › Novel Dromedary Dishes › Dromedary Dates with Cereal
Dromedary Dates with Cereal
Decorate a greased ring mold with stoned Dromedary Dates, and fill up the mold with well-cooked cereal. Turn out and serve with milk or cream.
A molded breakfast dish that depends entirely on the stiffness of the cereal. Everything else is decoration.
- "Well-cooked cereal"This means a hot breakfast porridge cooked past the usual point, until it is thick enough to hold a shape — farina, Cream of Wheat, oatmeal, hominy grits or cornmeal mush all work. Rolled oats cooked to package directions are too loose; use roughly two-thirds the usual water, or simmer well beyond the stated time.
- The hingeThe cereal has to be stiff enough to hold its shape, and letting it cool and set in the mold will help; turned out hot and loose it may slump and the ring of dates slide off the sides. The recipe itself specifies no chilling, so any setting time is a modern inference.
- "Stoned"Pitted. Dromedary was known for selling dates already pitted, though this recipe's own instruction to use "stoned" dates suggests the cook may still have had to do it; loose dates today may have stones. Halve them lengthwise and press the cut side against the mold so they lie flat and show cleanly when unmolded.
- Greasing the moldButter or a neutral oil, applied thinly. Too much grease and the dates float out of position as the cereal is added; a wipe with a paper towel after greasing is enough.
- Mold sizeA standard 1-quart ring mold takes roughly 3 to 4 cups of cooked cereal, from something like 3/4 cup uncooked farina or 1 1/2 cups rolled oats, plus a dozen or so date halves.
- Turning outDip the mold briefly in hot water and invert onto a plate. If it resists, run a thin knife around the outer edge only — working the center hole distorts the ring.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a breakfast or nursery dish. Cut in wedges at the table and pour milk or cream into the well; a little brown sugar or maple syrup is in keeping with the period.
Dromedary was the date brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, which sold pitted dates in cartons and promoted them through free recipe booklets of the kind this page appears to come from — the aim of such collections was to move packaged dates into meals where dried fruit had no traditional place. Molded cereal was a genuine habit of the era rather than a copywriter's invention: hot porridge was routinely cooked in quantity, poured into a wet bowl or mold, left to set, and served sliced cold with cream, or fried in butter the next morning. Setting a ring of dates into the mold turns thrift into a company dish, and it belongs to the same early twentieth-century enthusiasm for anything unmolded and glossy that gave American cooking its long love of the ring mold.