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Date Puddidng
1 1/2 C sugar 1 C graham flour 1 lb. dates Cook all together for 15 minutes. After cool add 1 teaspoon vanilla. Serve with whipped cream. 1/2 lb. walnuts or pecans Pinch of salt 1 qt. boiling water Mrs. Edgar Wells. ½ pt.
The page has come down to us scrambled: the method sits above a jumbled ingredient list, and the dates that give the pudding its name are missing entirely. What follows is what can be said responsibly about the text as printed.
- The list is incompleteNo dates appear in the ingredients, though the title calls for them. Whatever quantity was intended has been lost with the rest of the setting.
- "12 C sugar"Almost certainly a mangled fraction. Twelve cups of sugar against half a pint of milk is not a pudding in any sense. Treat the printed figure as a typesetting casualty rather than an instruction; the intended amount cannot be recovered from the page.
- Old liquid measuresHalf a pint of milk is one cup. A quart of boiling water is four cups, which is far too much liquid for this quantity of milk and sugar; the likeliest reading is that the boiling water is the bath the mixture cooks over rather than an ingredient stirred in.
- Cooking the eggFifteen minutes of direct heat will scramble a single egg in a cup of milk. Cook it in a bowl or the top of a double boiler set over the boiling water, stirring, until it coats a spoon — the fifteen minutes makes sense as a water-bath timing.
- Vanilla goes in coldThe instruction to add it after cooling is deliberate. Vanilla extract is alcohol-based and its aroma flashes off in a hot custard.
- NutsHalf a pound of walnuts or pecans is roughly two cups chopped. Toasting them briefly in a dry pan sharpens the flavour and keeps them from going soft in the pudding.
- YieldThe liquid quantities are small; expect a few servings in dishes or cups, chilled, with whipped cream spooned over at the table.
Community cookbooks like this one were often compiled by women's societies as fundraisers, each contributor signing her name to a favourite dish — hence Mrs. Edgar Wells at the foot of the page. Many entries are elliptical, written for readers close enough to the contributor to fill in the gaps. Dates themselves signal the era. By the early twentieth century, dried dates from North Africa and from the young California date plantings in the Coachella Valley appear to have been a fairly ordinary grocery item in the American Midwest, and they turn up constantly in the pudding and cake sections of these books — sweet, keeping well on a shelf, and dressy enough for company without costing much.