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Fruit and Nut Paste
2 cups dates, pitted 1 cup peanut butter 1 teaspoon salt Candied lemon or orange peel a few currants Wash and dry dates and put through a food chopper. Add peanut butter and salt. Mix well. Take single spoonful and form into balls, shaped like small apples. Roll in a little sugar. Press into each a currant to represent the blossom end and a piece of peel for the stem.
An uncooked confection of dates and peanut butter, shaped to look like miniature apples. Nothing here needs heat, so the whole job is texture control.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked food chopper of the period is closest to a meat grinder on a coarse plate. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same work, but stop before the dates turn to a single sticky mass or the paste will be too slack to hold a shape.
- DatesUse whole dried dates, not the pre-chopped sugar-coated kind. Medjool dates are much wetter than the deglet noor dates likely intended and will give a softer paste; if the mixture will not hold, add another spoonful or two of peanut butter.
- Peanut butterCommercial peanut butter of this period was generally less sweetened and less emulsified than most jars today. Natural-style peanut butter, stirred well, comes closer and firms up better after chilling.
- SaltA full teaspoon is a lot against 2 cups of dates, and modern peanut butter is already salted. Start with a quarter teaspoon and taste.
- ShapingChill the paste for half an hour before rolling. Cold paste releases from the hands and takes a rounder apple shape; warm paste smears.
- Peel and currantsCandied peel is sold in strips for baking; cut short slivers for the stems. Dried currants, not fresh ones, are what is meant by "a few currants" here.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly 24 to 30 balls the size of a walnut. Store them in a single layer in a covered tin; stacked, they stick together and lose the apple shape.
Date-and-nut-butter sweets like this one belong to the era when peanut butter moved from health-food novelty to pantry staple in American homes, and cookbooks began working it into candies, sandwiches and salads rather than treating it as a curiosity. The trick of shaping a paste into fruit in miniature is much older, descending from European marzipan work, where almond paste was tinted and modeled into apples, pears and peaches for banquet display; here the same conceit is done with cheap dried fruit and no cooking at all.