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Date Ice
Make a lemonade or orangeade and to each quart of liquid add one pound of stoned, chopped dates and a half cupful of fine chopped nuts. A little lemon extract may be added. Freeze.
This is a water ice rather than a cream ice, and the sugar level in your lemonade is doing double duty as flavour and as the thing that keeps the mixture scoopable. Treat the lemonade as a syrup, not a drink.
- Sweeten harder than you would for drinkingA lemonade pleasant to sip freezes into a solid block. Aim for roughly 1 cup sugar per quart of liquid, dissolved fully before chilling, which gives a texture you can spoon. The dates add sweetness too, so taste the base cold — cold blunts sugar noticeably.
- Quantities and yieldOne quart of base plus a pound of dates and half a cup of nuts makes about 1½ quarts frozen, enough for six to eight.
- "Stoned" datesSimply pitted. Deglet Noor are firm and chop cleanly; Medjool are wetter and sweeter and will want a slightly less sweet base. If the dates are dry and hard, soak them ten minutes in a little of the warm lemonade first.
- Chop finer than you thinkWhole date pieces freeze into cold, chewy nuggets. Chop to the size of a lentil, or pulse a third of them to a paste in the base so the date flavour is in the ice itself and not only in the lumps.
- NutsAlmonds or walnuts suit it well; toast and cool them first, since untoasted nuts go soft and slightly waxy in a frozen mixture. Add them at the very end of churning.
- Lemon extractA quarter teaspoon per quart is plenty; it turns soapy fast if overdone.
- FreezingIn an ice cream machine, churn 20 to 25 minutes, folding in the solids in the last two. Without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours for a granita texture, stirring the dates and nuts in once the mix is slushy so they stay suspended.
- Hold it softWater ices set very hard. Serve within an hour or two of churning, or let it stand ten minutes at room temperature before scooping.
An "ice" in a book of this vintage means a water ice — fruit juice, sugar and water frozen without dairy — as distinct from a cream, a custard or a sherbet lightened with milk or beaten egg white. The date-and-nut pairing that runs through this section of the book reflects a genuine shift in the American larder: dates had long arrived dried and pressed from North Africa and the Levant, but commercial date growing in the desert valleys of California and Arizona is generally traced to United States Department of Agriculture offshoot introductions around the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period start pushing dates well beyond the pudding and the sweetmeat tray. Freezing one into lemonade is a frugal, characteristically thrifty use of a sweet, expensive-looking ingredient: the dates supply body and sugar that would otherwise cost cream and eggs, in a household that likely already had an ice cream freezer, a bag of rock salt and a block of ice on the porch.