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Date Pudding
little salt little nutmeg
— Mrs. John Legg
One cup dates, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup walnuts, 2 eggs, 1 tbsp. flour. Mix well and bake in slow oven twenty minutes. Serve hot with cream.
— A Contributor
A flourless date-and-nut torte in all but name — one tablespoon of flour per two eggs makes this closer to a macaroon batter than a pudding. The instructions are as terse as community-cookbook entries get, so a few things need filling in.
- The stray first line"little salt little nutmeg — Mrs. John Legg" is the tail end of the previous recipe on the page, a common artifact of these densely set church cookbooks. It does not belong to the date pudding, though a pinch of salt does the batter no harm.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is generally reckoned at about 300F, though period usage ranges both lower and higher. At that temperature twenty minutes will leave the center wet in anything deeper than a shallow dish; bake in a shallow greased pan and judge by a set, faintly puffed surface rather than the clock.
- DatesDates were commonly sold pressed in blocks and had to be pitted and cut, often with a floured knife. Modern pitted dates work directly — about 6 oz for a cup, chopped — and the single tablespoon of flour may well be there to keep the pieces from clumping.
- WalnutsA cup of walnuts means shelled halves, coarsely broken, roughly 4 oz. Toasting them first is not in the original but sharpens the flavor against all that sugar.
- EggsBeat the eggs well before combining; they are the only leavening and the only binder in the recipe. There is no baking powder, so the texture is meant to be dense and chewy, not cakey.
- SugarA full cup against 6 oz of dates is very sweet by current taste. Reducing it by a third gives a more balanced result, though sugar contributes to the set here and the texture will change somewhat.
- Serve hot with creamPlain unwhipped heavy cream, poured over. The pudding is stiff enough to cut into squares once cool, much like the date bars built on similar proportions.
- YieldFour to six small servings. It is a very rich mixture.
Philathea cookbooks were fundraising collections compiled by Philathea classes — the young women's wing of the Baraca-Philathea movement, an adult Sunday-school organization that spread widely through American and Canadian Protestant churches in the early twentieth century. The recipes came in by the handful from members, printed under their married names or, as here, from "A Contributor," and edited barely at all, which is why one entry sometimes runs into the next. The dish itself reflects a specific moment in American pantries: imported dates, packaged and pressed, became cheap and shelf-stable in the decades around 1900, and cooks put them to work in exactly this kind of nearly flourless egg-and-nut batter. Recipes of this shape circulated under many names — date pudding, date torte, date loaf — and the same proportions survive today as date-nut bars.