Home › Desserts-Puddings › Date Pudding (C dates chopped fine C nuts)
Date Pudding (C dates chopped fine C nuts)
1 C dates, chopped fine 1 C nuts, chopped fine 1 level t baking powder ½ C sugar 3 eggs 1 T flour Mix together dates, nuts, flour and sugar and baking powder. Add beaten yolks of eggs and lastly well-beaten whites. Bake in slow oven one-half hour. Cool and cut in squares and serve with whipped Mrs. Dean Bennett. cream.
A near-flourless date and nut square in the mold of what later cookbooks call a chewing or date torte — one tablespoon of flour for the whole pan, with the eggs doing all the structural work. A few notes before you start.
- The garbled last lineThe attribution has landed in the middle of the final sentence during transcription. Read it as "Cool and cut in squares and serve with whipped cream. — Mrs. Dean Bennett."
- AbbreviationsC is a cup, t a teaspoon (here the recipe specifies a level one), T a tablespoon. The 1½ cups of sugar is not a misprint; this style of date pudding is deliberately very sweet, and the sugar plus eggs form the entire batter.
- Slow oven300–325°F. The low heat matters here: with almost no flour, the structure is meringue-like, and a hot oven will brown and toughen the top before the middle sets.
- Pan sizeNot given. An 8-inch square pan, buttered and floured, gives a layer about an inch deep that will be done in the stated half hour. A larger pan will bake faster and dry out.
- FoldingThe whipped whites go in last and should be folded, not stirred. This is the hinge of the recipe — deflate them and you get a dense, sticky slab rather than a light one.
- DatesChop them with a lightly oiled knife or scissors, and toss them through the flour and sugar so the pieces stay separate. Modern pitted Deglet Noor work well; Medjool are softer and wetter and want a little extra flour on the chopping board.
- NutsThe recipe just says nuts; walnuts or pecans are common choices in American recipes of this kind and suit the sweetness. Chop them fine, as directed — coarse pieces tear the fragile batter when you cut squares.
- Doneness and cuttingThe center should be set but still slightly moist; a tester comes out with a few crumbs. Cool completely in the pan before cutting, or the squares will collapse.
- YieldAbout 16 small squares from an 8-inch pan. It is rich, and a square with a spoonful of whipped cream is a serving.
Church and club cookbooks from the first decades of the twentieth century are thick with these egg-bound date squares, filed variously as date pudding or date torte, and they often share much the same skeleton: a cup of dates, a cup of nuts, sugar, eggs, and a spoonful or two of flour with baking powder. Dates were an inexpensive imported dried fruit widely available in American grocery stores by then, sold in slabs or pressed blocks, and they gave a dessert body and sweetness without much butter or flour regregation economy in a congregational fundraiser recipe meant to be carried to a supper and cut into squares. The whipped cream at the end converts what is essentially a bar cookie into a pudding.