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Date Jam
Jam may be made from dates by cooking in the proportion of one pound of stoned fruit to one cup of water and a half-pound of sugar-the sugar to be added after the fruit has simmered about eight minutes. Add with the sugar a teaspoonful of butter and spice, or lemon juice, or other flavouring as one chooses. Cook down until smooth and thick and place in jars.
A four-line jam that works well, provided you treat it as a refrigerator preserve rather than a shelf-stable one. Dates bring their own sugar and almost no acid, which changes both the flavour balance and the keeping.
- Do not store it on the shelfDates are low in acid (around pH 6 to 6.5), so this jam does not have the protection that a berry or citrus preserve does, and the recipe gives no sterilising or processing step at all. Pot it into clean jars, cool, and keep it in the refrigerator for a few weeks or freeze it; if you want a pantry preserve, follow a current tested recipe with measured acid.
- ProportionsOne pound of stoned dates, one cup water, half a pound (a little over 1 cup) sugar. Expect somewhere in the region of two to three cups of finished jam.
- Cut the sugar if you likeDried dates are already 60 to 70 percent sugar, so the full half-pound makes a very sweet, candy-like jam. Half that quantity still thickens and tastes more of the fruit; since you are not relying on sugar for shelf preservation, the reduction is safe here.
- Chop the dates firstWhole stoned dates take a long time to break down. Chop them coarsely and they will collapse into a puree within ten to fifteen minutes of the sugar going in.
- "A teaspoonful of butter and spice"The butter is there to knock down the foam and add gloss, not for flavour, and it is optional. For spice, read this as cinnamon, cardamom or a little clove, a quarter to half a teaspoon; lemon juice at a tablespoon or two per pound is the better choice, since it lifts the flat sweetness of dates considerably.
- Judging "smooth and thick"There is too little pectin here to test for a proper set. Cook until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that closes only slowly, which is usually five to ten minutes of steady simmering after the sugar. Stir often near the end; date sugars scorch on the bottom quickly.
- Softening hard datesIf your dates are dry rather than the soft Medjool sort, add another quarter cup of water at the start or the mixture will thicken before the fruit is tender.
- ServingThick and pastelike rather than spreadable-loose. Good on toast, but it also works as a filling for thumbprint cookies or rolled into a pastry.
Dates reached American kitchens in quantity in dried, packed form from Iraq and Egypt, and later from California, where commercial date planting in the Coachella Valley began in the first years of the twentieth century. Because a dried date needs no preserving of its own, it turns up in cookbooks of this period less as a jam fruit than as a cheap, keepable sweetener for puddings, breads and confections. That is the interest of a recipe like this one: it treats the date as though it were a fresh fruit going into a preserving pan, with the standard one-pound-to-half-a-pound sugar ratio applied by rote, when the fruit already carries more sugar than most jams end up with.