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Chinese Chews
1 large cup dates 1 tsp. Royal bak. powder 1 cup walnuts 1/4 tsp. salt 1 cup sugar 1 cup flour 1 tsp. vanilla 2 eggs Put nuts and dates through meat grinder, and add to mixture. It will be stiff, SO do not think you have forgotten milk. Makes 24.
A date-and-nut bar batter with no oven temperature, no pan size, and no baking time — all of which the original assumed its readers knew. Here is what the recipe leaves out.
- Pan and methodChinese Chews were typically baked in a shallow greased pan; an 8x8 or 9x9 inch tin gives about the right half-inch depth for this quantity, and the sheet was cut into squares or bars while still warm. The batter is too stiff to pour; press it out with a spatula or damp fingers.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes suits a bar of this depth: bake until the top is set and dry and the edges pull slightly from the pan. It stays chewy in the centre.
- "Royal bak. powder"Royal was a cream-of-tartar brand, not double-acting. Modern double-acting baking powder is stronger; use a scant teaspoon and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- Cups are not standardized"1 large cup dates" is deliberately generous — figure roughly 6 to 8 oz pitted dates and about 4 oz walnut halves. If your dates are dry rather than soft, the batter will be difficult; look for soft Medjool, or plump drier Deglet Noor before using them.
- The meat grinderA food processor does this in seconds, but pulse rather than run it: dates turn to paste and walnuts to butter very quickly. A coarse, uneven grind gives the better texture. Toss the ground dates with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from clumping.
- Stiffness is correctThe note about milk is the most useful line in the recipe. There is no liquid beyond two eggs and the moisture in the dates. Do not loosen it.
- FinishingThese were commonly cut warm and rolled in powdered sugar, or cut into strips and rolled into cylinders while pliable. Both are optional; the bars keep several days in a tin.
- YieldTwenty-four small bars from an 8-inch pan, which is a modest cookie — about the size of a domino.
Chinese Chews appear in community and church cookbooks across the United States and Canada from roughly the 1910s through the 1950s, almost always with this same short ingredient list: dates, walnuts, sugar, flour, eggs. The name has nothing to do with Chinese cooking, and no origin for it has ever been documented; it is generally taken as an example of the period's habit of attaching a vaguely exotic label to a sweet, sticky confection. What made the recipe travel was economy and reliability: dates were cheap and widely available, and the bar needs no creaming, no rolling and no cutter. Its place among the doughnuts and cookies in a Philathea class cookbook is exactly right: these were bake-sale and church-supper sweets, made in quantity, cut in a pan, and carried in a tin.