Royal Date Cake
1 cup boiling water 1 lb. stoned and cut dates 3/4 cup brown sugar 2 tablespoons butter or other shortening 1 square melted chocolate 1 egg 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 3/4 cups flour 3/4 cup pecan nuts Pour boiling water over dates. Cream sugar and shortening; add melted chocolate and well beaten egg; mix well and add dates and water; sift together baking powder, salt and flour; add gradually with pecan nuts. Put into greased loaf pan and bake very slowly for one and a half hours.
A dense, fruit-heavy loaf closer to a quick bread than a layer cake, and the long low bake is what keeps it from drying out. A few of the original's terms need translating.
- "Very slowly" means 300F"Very slowly" means a very slow oven -- Period tables put a slow oven at about 300-325F and a very slow oven lower still, around 250-275F. Bake at roughly 275-300F; at that temperature an hour and a half is realistic for a full loaf pan.
- One square of chocolateThat is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard American square of the era. Bittersweet is not a straight substitute here — the loaf carries very little sugar for the amount of fruit, and the unsweetened square is meant to read as depth rather than sweetness.
- A pound of dates is a lotStoned and cut, that is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups. The dates plus their soaking water make up more of the batter's bulk than the flour does, which is why the finished loaf is heavy and moist rather than cake-crumbed.
- Let the dates coolThe boiling water is poured over the fruit to soften it, but the mixture must come down to lukewarm before it meets the beaten egg, or the egg will set in threads. Soak while you cream the butter and sugar.
- Royal Baking PowderA branded cream-of-tartar powder in this period, i.e. fast-acting rather than double-acting, but any modern double-acting baking powder works one for one. There is no soda in the formula despite the fruit, so do not add any.
- Pan and liningThe recipe says only a greased loaf pan; a standard 9 x 5 inch tin suits the quantity. Grease it and line the base with parchment -- the sugar and dates make the bottom prone to sticking over a ninety-minute bake.
- Testing itA skewer will come out sticky from date flesh even when the loaf is done, so judge by a firm top that springs back and edges pulling from the pan. Cool completely in the tin; it slices badly warm.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about twelve to sixteen slices. Wrapped, it improves for a day or two as the moisture from the dates redistributes.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which spent decades putting free or near-free cookbooks into American kitchens with its own product named throughout the leavened recipes — a form of advertising so effective that "Royal Baking Powder" reads here as an ingredient rather than a brand. The date cake itself belongs to a wave of date cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, when commercial date growing in California's Coachella Valley, established from imported offshoots around the turn of the century, made the fruit cheap and familiar to cooks who had largely known it as an imported item. Pairing dates with chocolate and pecans, and baking the mixture as a loaf rather than a layer, gave households a cake that needed no icing and kept well — practical virtues that recur throughout the promotional cookbooks of the period.