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Dates with Breakfast Food
With any cooked breakfast food stir in a cup or more of stoned, chopped dates a few minutes before removing from the fire. Or, they may be added to any uncooked, flaked food with delicious effect.
A one-line method that assumes you already have a pot of porridge going. The only real decision is when the dates go in.
- The hinge: add them lateDates stirred in at the start of a long simmer collapse into the cereal and turn it uniformly sweet and sticky. The few minutes before the pan comes off the fire, as the recipe directs, are enough for them to soften and warm through while staying distinct.
- "Breakfast food"Period shorthand for prepared cereals generally; the cooked sort meant here would be rolled or steel-cut oats, cracked wheat, farina, hominy grits, cornmeal mush. Any of these works.
- "Uncooked, flaked food"The cold flaked cereals, corn and wheat flakes among them, that were reaching the market in this period. Chopped dates on modern flakes work the same way, though they will soften quickly once milk is added.
- "Stoned"Pitted. Most dates sold today come pitted, but check by feel before chopping; a stray stone is hard enough to break a tooth.
- "Removing from the fire"Taking the pan off the heat. Nothing more is implied.
- QuantityA cup of chopped dates is generous, and the original does not say for how much cereal. Figure roughly two tablespoons per serving as a starting point and adjust; dates are very sweet and you will likely want less added sugar.
- Which datesSoft Medjools chop into a sticky mass and want a lightly oiled knife. Drier varieties such as Deglet Noor dice more cleanly; imported dates of the period generally arrived dried and often pressed into blocks or boxes, rather than plump and refrigerated.
Dates reached American kitchens in quantity in the late nineteenth century, shipped dried and pressed from Persian Gulf and North African ports, and they became a standard pantry sweetener. The recipe's other half, the "breakfast food," is equally of its moment: the 1890s and 1900s saw the American breakfast table reorganised around packaged cereals, hot and cold, promoted heavily on health grounds. Fruit cookbooks of the period are full of these one-sentence suggestions for making the new cereals palatable. Coconut, arriving shredded and sweetened in packets — commercial shredded coconut was sold from the 1880s — was the other convenience the period reached for, and the pairing of the two turns up repeatedly in puddings, cakes and confections of the time.