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Date Bars
Bake in two square pans. Cut in bars while warm and roll in sugar. Mrs. Minnie Dymond. 1. C sugar 3 eggs 1 C nutmeats 1 lb. dates DATE BAГ flour t baking powder Pinch salt Beat egg yolks, add sugar and stir until creamy. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt, together. Add nuts and dates, finely chopped, to flour mixture. Mix well. Fold in stiffly beaten egg-whites. Bake in sheet pan in moderate oven for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cut in squares. Roll in powdered sugar.
Mrs. Fred Mordhorst. 14 C shortening 1 egg 1 t soda
A flourless-leaning nut and date bar of the kind that filled church cookbooks in the mid-twentieth century: essentially a sponge batter carrying more fruit and nuts than dough. The one thing to get right is the egg white, which is the only real lift the batter has.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F is the usual reading of "moderate." The page gives thirty minutes; it specifies two square pans in the first recipe and a sheet pan in the second, so judge depth by the pan you use.
- The flour quantity is missingThe amount of flour, and the fraction on the baking powder, are not given in the text as printed. The figure cannot be recovered from this page, so work from a comparable date-bar recipe.
- Fold, do not stirThe stiffly beaten whites carry most of the structure here, alongside the baking powder. Fold them in with a spatula in three additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Flour the fruitTossing the chopped dates and nuts through the dry mixture before combining keeps them from sinking and stops the sticky dates clumping into a single mass.
- DatesA pound of dates, to be chopped fine as the method directs. Pitted Medjool will give a wetter, softer bar than a drier date such as Deglet Noor.
- NutmeatsSimply shelled nuts, walnuts or pecans in a book of this period. Chop them to pea size so the bars cut cleanly.
- Cut while warmCut and roll in powdered sugar while the sheet is still warm but not hot. Cold bars tear at the edges, and sugar rolled on a hot bar dissolves to syrup.
Date bars belong to the era when dried dates arrived cheaply by rail and steamship and were increasingly a pantry staple far from anywhere a date palm grows; American cookbooks from the 1900s onward are full of date loaves, date pinwheels and date bars. Recipes like this one, with almost no flour and a great deal of fruit and nuts, are the frugal cousin of the torte, using beaten eggs to hold together ingredients that were themselves the point. In a community collection such as this one, each contributor's name attached to her recipe would have served as both credit and guarantee, and duplicate titles from different women were left standing side by side rather than merged.