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Date Pie
For two pies use a pound of dates. Wash them and place in a crock with a quart of milk to heat slowly. When soft stone them and crush or put through colander. Add an egg or a tablespoon of dissolved cornstarch to thicken, then place in a baked pastry shell. Whipped cream or a meringue may be used with this or thin lattice strips of paste laced over it.
A simple date custard from the era when boxed dried dates first became a year-round grocery item. The instructions stop short of a crucial step, so read the point about setting the filling before you start.
- The hinge: the filling must be cookedAs written, the egg is stirred into hot date pulp and the pie is assembled with no further cooking. Egg needs real heat to both thicken and be safe: keep the pulp over low heat and stir until it visibly thickens and coats the spoon, or pour it into the shell and bake in a moderate oven (about 350F) until just set, roughly 25-30 minutes.
- A quart of milk is a starting point, not a final measureFour cups of milk to a pound of dates makes a thin slurry. The milk is there to soften the fruit; expect to cook the mixture down considerably, or use 2 to 3 cups and add more only if the pulp is stiff. Judge by consistency, not by the original number.
- "Crock" means a heavy potA stoneware crock set on the range or in a water bath. Use a heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat, and stir — milk and sugary fruit scorch quickly.
- Stoning the datesMost supermarket dates are already pitted, which saves the step entirely. If you buy them whole, slit and pit them before cooking rather than after; hot dates are messy to handle.
- Pressing the pulp"Through a colander" means forced through with the back of a spoon to catch skins. A food mill or coarse sieve does it faster, and a short blitz with an immersion blender is acceptable if you do not mind the skin flecks.
- Cornstarch as the alternativeA tablespoon dissolved in cold milk will thicken this much filling only lightly. It must be brought to a boil for a minute or the starch will not set and the slices will slump.
- Meringue and latticeIf you use meringue, allow about 2 egg whites per pie, sweetened to taste, and brown in a moderate oven until coloured. A lattice of raw pastry over an already-baked shell needs the strips baked separately, or the crust edge will scorch before the pastry cooks.
- Yield and sweeteningMakes two pies, six to eight servings each depending on the tin; the recipe does not state a size. It adds no sugar at all — dates carry it — but a pinch of salt and a little cinnamon or lemon zest keeps the filling from tasting flat.
Dates reached American grocers in quantity as a packaged import in the late nineteenth century, as pressed blocks and cartons of pitted fruit from North Africa and the Levant, and date palm offshoots were being established commercially in California's Coachella Valley in the following decades, which helped make dates a cheap everyday baking ingredient by the 1910s and 1920s. Cookbooks of the period often lean on them as a sweetener as much as a fruit — date filling needs no sugar, which mattered in a household economising on it. Recipes like this one, written for a cook assumed to know when a custard was done, frequently leave the setting of the filling to the reader's judgement rather than spelling out a baking step.