Date Toast
2 cups of dates Water 4 tablespoons milk 1 tablespoon cream Toast Immerse the dates in cold water, remove the stones and wash in hot water. Cook the dates in an equal quantity of boiling water until they are very soft and quite thick. Put them through a colander, and add the milk and cream. Pour this over crisp toasted bread.
A wartime-era breakfast dish: stewed dates thinned with a little dairy and spooned over toast. The whole thing hinges on cooking the dates down far enough that the purée is thick rather than watery.
- QuantityThe two cups are measured with the stones still in; expect roughly 10-12 oz (300-340 g) of fruit once pitted. "An equal quantity of boiling water" means about 2 cups; expect to simmer 15-25 minutes, stirring, until the mass mounds on a spoon.
- PittingThe cold-water soak is there to soften stiff dried dates so the stones come out cleanly. Modern Deglet Noor or Medjool dates are sold soft and often already pitted, so the soak and the hot-water rinse can both be skipped.
- "Through a colander"This means pressing the cooked fruit through with a wooden spoon or pestle to strain out skins — a food mill or coarse sieve does the same job. A blender gives a smoother purée but leaves the skins in, which is fine if you don't mind the texture.
- Milk and creamFour tablespoons of milk plus one of cream is a small amount, meant only to loosen the purée and gloss it. Add it off the heat and judge by consistency; very dry dates may want a spoonful or two more.
- The toast"Crisp" is doing real work here — a soft slice collapses under hot fruit purée. Toast it dark and dry, and assemble immediately before serving.
- YieldProbably enough pur e for four to six slices, though the recipe gives no yield. Any left over keeps several days refrigerated and reheats with a splash of milk.
- SeasoningThe recipe is unsweetened and unspiced, as dates are sugar enough. A pinch of salt in the pan and a scrape of lemon zest or cinnamon at the end sharpens what is otherwise a very flat sweetness.
Date-on-toast dishes belong to a family of "cream toasts" that filled the breakfast pages of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s — bread crisped and then masked with a hot sauce of milk, dried fruit, or vegetables, a way of making a substantial dish out of pantry staples and stale bread. The technique is older than the book — pressing stewed fruit through a sieve to remove skins is standard nineteenth-century practice — and dried dates were among the cheaper concentrated sweeteners available to a household, which may account for the absence of added sugar here.