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Pastry Strips
Roll out pastry into oblong shapes, spread with a paste made as follows: 1/2 cup seeded dates 1/2 cup seeded raisins 1/4 cup chopped walnuts Put through a chopper, and if quite dry, moisten with a tablespoon of orange juice. Roll the strips and then flatten with a rolling pin. Cut into one-half inch strips, and bake in a moderate oven.
A rolled fruit-and-nut pastry with almost nothing specified: no pastry quantity, no oven number, no time. The proportions of the filling are the only fixed part, so treat everything else as a sketch.
- How much pastryNo quantity is given. The filling measures 1 1/4 cups of ingredients before grinding and less once ground, which would suit a modest batch of pastry; a single- to double-crust quantity is a reasonable guess rather than a fixed scale.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat the strips will probably need something like 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is set and pale gold; watch them, as the sugar in the dates can catch.
- Put through a chopperA hand-cranked food grinder, the standard clamp-on kitchen tool of the period. A food processor does the same job in short pulses; run it too long and the dates turn to a single sticky mass rather than a spreadable paste.
- Seeded dates and raisinsHere "seeded" means the pits or seeds have been taken out, not that they have been added. Modern pitted dates and seedless raisins need no further work.
- The rollingThe instruction is ambiguous. The likeliest reading is that the paste is spread on the oblong, the sheet rolled up and then flattened with the pin before slicing, which would give a flattened spiral rather than a round pinwheel.
- CuttingHalf-inch slices cut across the flattened roll. Chill the roll for twenty minutes first if the paste is soft, or the slices will smear.
- MoisteningA tablespoon of orange juice is a starting point. Dry supermarket dates often need two, worked in until the mixture holds together but does not weep.
- YieldImpossible to state, since no pastry quantity is given; it depends entirely on how much dough is rolled and how thin. Stored in a tin they will keep for a few days.
Date-and-nut fillings rolled into pastry belong to a large family of American "fruit strips" and "date bars" that spread through community and institutional cookbooks in the early twentieth century, when dates from California and the Middle East were becoming more widely available. Recipes of this kind leaned hard on dried fruit and nuts for both sweetness and substance, and one like this stretched a modest amount of pastry into a great many pieces.