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Date and Peanut Goody
1 cup roasted peanuts 2 tablespoons fruit juice 1 cup stoned dates Put dates and nuts through meat chopper, using coarse blade, moisten with fruit juice, cool, roll into small balls and place on platter to harden.
A no-cook confection of two ingredients plus enough juice to bind. The only equipment question is what stands in for the hand-cranked meat chopper.
- Meat chopper, coarse bladeA hand-cranked grinder shears the dates and peanuts into a coarse, slightly sticky mass rather than a paste. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same job; run it continuously and you get peanut butter bound with date puree, which will not hold a ball shape.
- Fruit juiceThe recipe does not specify which; orange juice is a reasonable choice. Two tablespoons is a starting point: add it a teaspoon at a time, since dates vary enormously in moisture and too much juice makes the mixture unrollable.
- Roasted peanutsUnsalted roasted peanuts, skins rubbed off, give the cleanest flavour. Salted cocktail peanuts work but shift the balance sharply; if using them, skip any additional salt entirely.
- Stoned dates"Stoned" means pitted. Deglet Noor are firm enough to grind cleanly; Medjool are wetter and softer, so you may need no juice at all with them.
- "Cool"Nothing here is heated, so this means chill the ground mixture before shaping. Twenty to thirty minutes in the refrigerator firms the dates and makes the balls far easier to roll without the mixture clinging to your palms.
- Hardening and finishingThey firm up rather than set hard, taking an hour or two at room temperature or less in the refrigerator. Rolling the finished balls in desiccated coconut, finely chopped peanuts or icing sugar keeps them from sticking to each other in a box.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 20 to 24 walnut-sized balls. Layered between waxed paper in a tin they keep a week at room temperature, longer refrigerated.
Uncooked "goodies" like this one belong to a family of date-and-nut confections that spread through American home cooking in the first decades of the twentieth century, when California and imported Middle Eastern dates became cheap and widely available in packages and peanuts had shifted from a novelty to a pantry staple. The appeal was practical: no sugar boiling, no thermometer, no candy-making skill, and a hand-cranked meat grinder doing all the work.