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A Simple Dessert
1 t soda 1 C boiling water 1/2 C nutmeats, if desired Whipped cream Pour boiling water over dates and soda and while cooling cream butter and sugar. Add egg, flour, dates and nuts last. Bake in sheets or cup cakes. Serve with whipped cream. 1¼ C white sugar
A date cake of the plainest church-supper type, leavened by the reaction between baking soda and hot water poured over the fruit. A few of the quantities are not stated in the text as it stands, so treat this as a method rather than a formula.
- The hinge: soaking the datesBoiling water and soda poured over chopped dates soften the fruit to near-purée and darken it. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm before it meets the creamed butter, or the butter will melt and the cake will be greasy and dense.
- "1 t soda"One teaspoon of baking soda; no baking powder appears in the text as it stands, so the batter should go into the oven promptly once the flour is in.
- Missing proportionsAmounts for the dates, butter, egg and flour are not given (the nutmeats are specified as 1/2 cup), and the sugar figure reads as "14 C," which cannot be right. No reliable proportions can be recovered from the text as it stands.
- NutmeatsSimply shelled nuts, often walnuts. Half a cup, chopped, folded in with the flour.
- "Bake in sheets"A shallow rectangular pan rather than a rimmed cookie sheet. The recipe gives no oven temperature, pan size or baking time; a moderate oven of around 350F would suit a soft date batter, with timing judged by eye and cup cakes needing appreciably less than a sheet.
- ServingCut in squares and topped with lightly sweetened whipped cream, as the recipe directs. Yield depends on pan size and on quantities the text does not give.
Date cakes and date puddings crowd the dessert pages of American community cookbooks from roughly 1900 through the 1950s, and for a practical reason: dried dates shipped and stored well, arrived in bulk as imports from North Africa and the Middle East, and gave sweetness, moisture and body to a cake that needed little butter and no fresh fruit. The trick of pouring boiling water and soda over the fruit is older than the dates themselves; it comes straight from the raisin and prune cakes of the nineteenth century, where the alkali both softened tough dried fruit and gave the batter its lift.