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Date Cake
1 C dates, cut fine. 1 C hot water. 1 t soda. 1 egg 1 small T butter 1 C sugar Ida McKibben. ½ C flour-1 t baking powder Pour water and soda on dates and let cool. Mix sugar and butter together. Beat in one egg and date mixture. Add flour and baking powder.
Mrs. R. Folger.
Mrs. Herman Brockman and Mrs. Anna Suydam use 1½ C flour and add 2 C walnut meats.
Mrs. Linna Corlett uses 1¾ C flour.
A church-supper date loaf recorded in shorthand, with the community's variations appended. The ingredient list has lost a line: the dates, the boiling water and the soda appear only in the method, with no quantities given at all.
- The missing quantitiesThe first instruction calls for water and soda poured over dates, but none of the three is measured anywhere on the page. Comparable date loaves of the period use about 1 cup chopped dates, 1 cup boiling water and 1 teaspoon soda; treat that as a reconstruction rather than as what Mrs. Folger wrote.
- Why the soda and the boiling waterThe soda softens the dates and darkens them, and may add a little lift of its own alongside the baking powder. The recipe insists the mixture cool before it meets the egg, presumably so the egg does not set in threads.
- "1 small T butter"A scant tablespoon, roughly 1/2 oz. This is a very lean batter by modern standards, closer to a quick bread than a cake.
- "14 C flour"Almost certainly a lost fraction in printing, most plausibly 1 1/4 cups. Fourteen cups of flour against one cup of sugar and one egg is not a cake.
- The nut variationDropping to 1 1/2 cups flour and adding 2 cups walnut meats makes a dense, barely-bound loaf that slices best the next day. Chop the walnuts coarsely and toss them in a little of the flour so they do not sink.
- Oven and tinNo temperature or time is given anywhere on the page. As a modern starting point, 350F in a single loaf tin, roughly 45 to 55 minutes, tested with a skewer in the centre. The nut version will bake more slowly and brown faster, so watch the top.
- YieldProbably one loaf, around 8 by 4 inches, giving ten or twelve slices; the page says nothing about tin, yield or keeping.
Date loaves spread through American community cookbooks in the decades either side of 1900, as dried dates -- largely imported Middle Eastern stock, with California's Coachella Valley plantings becoming commercially significant only from the 1910s and 1920s -- grew cheaper and more widely stocked. Pouring soda and hot water over hard packed dates was one common household way of softening them without a long soak, and related methods appear in date-nut breads and boiled fruit cakes. What is most characteristic of this entry is its form: four names attached to one recipe, each cook's deviation recorded as faithfully as the original. Compiled church cookbooks served as a register of contributors as well as a set of instructions, and entries of this kind routinely omit any oven direction.