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Date Bread
Use recipe for Health Food Muffins. After the first rising, while kneading, add two-thirds cup each of English walnut meats cut in small pieces, and dates stoned and cut in pieces. Shape in a loaf, let rise in pan, and bake fifty minutes in a moderate oven. This bread is well adapted for sandwiches.
A yeast-raised fruit-and-nut loaf built on another formula in the same chapter, so read both before starting. The additions go in late, after the dough has already risen once.
- You need the base recipeNothing here works without the Health Food Muffins dough, which supplies the flour, liquid and leavening. Look it up in the same section; the recipe does not say what proportion of that batch a single loaf takes, so check the base yield before you mix.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Fifty minutes suits a single loaf in a pan of roughly 9x5 inches, though the recipe specifies neither pan nor temperature; the crumb is done at 190-200F internal, and a loaf that browns too fast can be tented with foil for the last fifteen minutes.
- Why the fruit goes in after the first riseThe recipe gives no reason, but the usual explanation is that dates and walnuts worked in at mixing interfere with gluten development, and the dates' sugar can slacken the dough. Adding them once the gluten is built helps keep the loaf tall enough to slice.
- Two-thirds cup eachRoughly 2 1/2 oz walnut pieces and about 3 1/2 oz chopped dates. Weigh the dates after pitting, not before.
- Stoned datesBuy pitted dates and check each one by hand; a stray stone in a bread loaf is a broken tooth. Deglet Noor chop more cleanly than Medjool, which are wetter and clump. Tossing the pieces in a spoonful of flour keeps them separate as you work them in.
- English walnut meatsSimply the common walnut, as opposed to the American black walnut. Taste them first; walnuts turn rancid quickly, and stale nuts will carry through the whole loaf.
- Kneading in the additionsFlatten the risen dough, scatter half the fruit and nuts, fold, and repeat. Handle it briefly. Overworking at this stage tears the dough and smears the dates into the crumb.
- Second rise and yieldLet the shaped loaf rise in the pan until it has just crowned above the rim, roughly 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen. One loaf, about 12 to 14 slices.
- For sandwichesCool completely before slicing or the dates drag. It keeps a couple of days wrapped at room temperature; cream cheese is a common filling for breads of this kind.
Cookbooks of the health-reform school that flourished around American sanitarium kitchens at the turn of the twentieth century leaned heavily on nuts and dried fruit, which supplied richness and sweetness in a cuisine that was suspicious of meat, and often of butter, spices and strong coffee besides; the "Health Food Muffins" base suggests this loaf belongs to that general current, though the book itself is not identified here. Dates reached the United States as an imported dried fruit from North Africa and the Middle East well before commercial groves were established in the California desert, and their concentrated sugar let a baker sweeten a loaf without adding any. Date-and-nut bread spread with cream cheese became a familiar item on tea tables and in boxed lunches, and such breads remained a fixture of American home baking for decades.