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Stuffed Dates
These are not necessarily for mere sweetmeats as there is in them a great amount of condensed nourishment, though they make a most "dainty dish to set before a king."
Select the largest dates and pinch out the stones.
Fill space with nuts or a plain cream-candy filling made by working in with the whipped white of an egg as much powdered or confectioners' sugar as it will stand. This should be flavoured with lemon juice or some other decided flavour. (Or, see Introductory Recipes.)
A two-line confection with one real problem: the filling is uncooked egg white, eaten raw, and nothing in the process brings it to a safe temperature.
- The raw egg whiteThe cream-candy filling is whipped white beaten with sugar and never heated. Raw shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella, and sugar at this concentration does not make the mixture safe — it is not a boiled fondant or an Italian meringue. Stuffed dates are also typically made ahead and left at room temperature on a plate for hours, which does nothing to help. If you want the candy filling, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites or a cooked syrup.
- "As much sugar as it will stand"An unmeasurable instruction. One large white will absorb somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 cups of confectioners' sugar before it stops taking any, depending on humidity and how stiffly the white was beaten, so no fixed conversion is honest here.
- Confectioners' vs. powderedIn this period the two words largely overlapped for finely ground sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar carries a small proportion of cornstarch, typically a few percent, so it is not quite the same product the recipe assumes.
- The nut fillingThe first option in the recipe, dates pitted and filled with nuts, involves no egg at all. The recipe does not say which nuts.
- Choosing the datesThe recipe simply asks for the largest available. Medjools are the obvious modern equivalent and pit easily by pressing the fruit open along one side with a thumb; the drier Deglet Noor sold loose is too firm to stuff neatly without softening first.
- YieldThe book gives none. A pound of Medjools is roughly 20 to 24 dates, which is the practical size for a single plate of sweets.
Stuffed dates belong to the American "candy-making at home" vogue of the 1890s and 1900s, when chafing-dish suppers and church fairs created steady demand for confections that needed no thermometer and no copper pan. They appear in a fruit cookery book rather than a candy chapter, in a period when fruit and nut confections were promoted by health reformers as wholesome substitutes for commercial chocolates. Dates themselves arrived in quantity from Persian Gulf ports through Basra, and the first Californian date plantings in the Coachella Valley were still experimental when this recipe was in circulation, so the fruit a reader bought was likely imported. The quoted phrase "a dainty dish to set before a king" is from the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence," a stock flourish in period cookbooks.