Date Whip
1 cup stoned and chopped dates cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lemon juice 3 egg whites cup sugar ½ teaspoon salt Cook dates in boiling water until tender; press through a sieve. Beat whites until stiff; add sugar, lemon juice and salt. Carefully fold in the date pulp, pile lightly on a buttered baking dish, and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven. Serve with soft custard or with whipped cream.
Prune Soufflé Substitute two cups prunes, for dates, in Date Whip, and follow rule for Date Whip.
A baked fruit meringue of the sort that filled the dessert chapters of American cookbooks a century ago. It is straightforward, but the printed text has lost some of its fractions and one instruction does the real work.
- The missing fractionsTwo quantities in the original have dropped their numerators in printing: "cup boiling water" and "cup sugar." Half a cup of each is the usual proportion for this style of whip, but the original as it stands is genuinely ambiguous and should be treated as such.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. The dish is set rather than browned, so a hotter oven will colour the meringue before the interior firms.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe date pulp is heavy and sweet, and it will deflate whipped whites in seconds. Sieve the cooked dates, let the purée cool to room temperature, then fold it into the meringue in two or three additions with a spatula, stopping while streaks remain.
- DatesDeglet Noor dates need the full cooking to soften; Medjool are already soft and moist and may need only a few minutes in the water. Either way the pulp should be thick enough to hold a shape, not soupy.
- SievingPressing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth purée at the time. A food processor does it faster, though a sieve afterwards still catches skins.
- The baking dishA buttered 1 to 1.5 quart dish is right. Piled loosely, the mixture puffs and then settles as it cools, like any soufflé; serve it soon after it leaves the oven.
- Prune soufflé variationThe measure is ambiguous. Since the dates are measured stoned and chopped before cooking, two cups of prunes probably means the fruit measured the same way; either reading needs the prunes soaked and simmered until tender, then pitted and sieved.
- Yield and servingThree whites make four modest servings. Soft custard here is a stirred pouring custard (crème anglaise), cooked to about 175F and served cool alongside.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in the first decade of the twentieth century — one of many volumes issued by food firms as both cookbook and advertisement. Its dessert chapter belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition, where "whips," "snows" and fruit soufflés let a cook turn three egg whites and a cup of fruit into a company dessert without cream. Dates and prunes appear constantly in such books because both were shelf-stable dried fruit available year-round, a considerable advantage before reliable refrigeration; a bag of dates from the grocer's could stand in for fresh fruit in February. The instruction to serve with soft custard is characteristic of the period, when a thin stirred custard was a common sauce for baked and light desserts.