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Date Bread
1 egg. 1/2 cup sugar. 1½ cups sweet milk 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 lb. stoned dates 1 cup chopped walnuts.
Put in buttered loaf pan. Let rise ½ hour, then bake in moderate oven.
A bare-bones quick bread of the sort that fills the "Fancy Bread" chapters of milling-company cookbooks: the flour company assumed you already knew how a loaf behaved. A few gaps need filling before it works.
- Ignore the half-hour riseThere is no yeast here, only baking powder, which begins releasing gas as soon as it meets liquid. A long stand may cost some of that lift, so it is safer to mix and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F, the usual reading for "moderate" in books of this period. A loaf this dense and this heavily fruited wants 55 to 70 minutes; cover the top loosely with foil if the crust darkens before the centre sets.
- The batter is very stiffFour cups of flour to a cup and a half of milk gives a thick, almost kneadable dough rather than a pourable batter. That is intentional for a fruit loaf, but press it into the pan rather than expecting it to level itself.
- No sugar, no fat, no eggThe sweetness comes entirely from a pound of dates. If you want something closer to a modern date-nut bread, that is a different recipe; as written it is closer to a plain tea loaf carried by its fruit.
- A pound of datesThat is roughly 2½ to 3 cups once stoned and chopped. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not clump or sink.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, higher in protein than most all-purpose flour sold today. Modern bread flour is the nearer match; all-purpose works but gives a softer, more crumbly loaf.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk called for elsewhere in these books, which would have needed soda instead of baking powder.
- Pan and yieldFour cups of flour plus a pound of dates is more than one 9x5 inch loaf pan will hold; divide it between two pans. Butter well and line the base, as the dates will stick. Cool completely before slicing, and expect it to cut better the next day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal in the 1910s and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, many of the recipes contributed by home cooks who used the brand. Its "Fancy Bread" section catches a specific moment: baking powder had made a loaf possible in an afternoon rather than a day, and dates, shipped in pressed blocks from the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Middle East, had become cheap enough in North American grocery stores to be used by the pound rather than the handful. Date and nut loaves multiplied in community and promotional cookbooks through the 1910s and 1920s for exactly that reason. The stray instruction to let it rise half an hour may be a holdover of habit, the kind of yeast-bread reflex that can survive in print long after the leavening has changed underneath it, though a half-hour stand appears deliberately in plenty of period quick-bread recipes.