Home › Cookies-Doughnuts › Chinese Chews
Chinese Chews
Mrs. Fern Gover. 14 t salt 1 C chopped walnuts 2 eggs Mix dry ingredients. Add nuts, dates and beaten eggs. Spread in thin sheets and bake in a slow oven not allowing to bake hard on edges. Cut in 1½ in. squares. When cool enough to handle, form into balls and roll in powdered sugar. This makes about 50.
Mrs. Forrest Thomson. 2 C brown sugar 1 C lard 3 eggs 1/4 t salt
This page has been mangled somewhere between the original typesetting and the transcription: the method calls for dates and dry ingredients that never appear in the list, and the last four lines belong to the recipe that follows. Read the points below before you shop.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe instructions call for dry ingredients and dates, but only salt, walnuts and eggs are given. Flour, sugar, baking powder and the dates themselves are missing, and there is no honest way to reconstruct the amounts from what survives on the page. Treat this as a historical fragment rather than a working formula.
- "14 t salt"Almost certainly a mangled fraction, most likely 1/4 t (the quantity that appears in the following recipe). Fourteen teaspoons of salt in a pan of date bars would be inedible.
- The last four lines are a different recipe"2 C brown sugar, 1 C lard, 3 eggs, 1/4 t salt" sits under Mrs. Forrest Thomson's name and belongs to a separate entry. Do not fold it into the Chinese Chews.
- A slow ovenRoughly 300-325F, and the warning about the edges is the real instruction here. A thin sheet of date-and-nut batter sets at the rim long before the centre, and once the edges harden the squares will not roll into balls.
- Cut warm, roll warmThe recipe cuts into 1½-inch squares first and only then waits until they are "cool enough to handle" before rolling, so the cutting is meant to happen while the sheet is still warm.
- YieldAbout 50, per the original.
Chinese Chews have nothing to do with Chinese cooking: they are an American date-and-walnut bar that turns up in church and club cookbooks across the United States from roughly the 1910s onward. The label is generally traced to the early-twentieth-century fashion for giving homely recipes vaguely exotic names, combined with the frankly chewy texture of a thin, underbaked date batter. Their spread owes a good deal to cheap packaged dates, which arrived in American grocery stores in quantity in the same decades and gave home bakers a sticky, sweet fruit that needed no cooking and kept on the shelf. In a compiled cookbook, the recipe is contributed rather than tested, which is how a list can reach print missing half its ingredients.