Date Creams
The same as the preceding kind with dates cut in pieces to use instead of walnuts.
This is a one-line variation, and everything that governs it lives in the recipe printed above it — a batch of fondant "cream" centers finished with nuts. Read the two together before starting.
- Find the parent recipe first"The same as the preceding kind" means the walnut cream immediately before it, which supplies the quantities and the method. On its own this entry gives no quantities at all.
- What a "cream" isIn confectionery of this kind a "cream" is usually a fondant centre: boiled sugar syrup worked until it turns opaque and plastic, then hand-shaped. It is unlikely to mean a custard or a filling, though this entry does not say.
- Fondant temperature is the hingeThe book gives no temperature. Fondant syrup is generally taken to the soft-ball stage, around 238-240F on a modern thermometer; under that it will not firm, and well over it the finished creams tend to turn sandy rather than melting.
- Dates behave nothing like walnutsDate pieces are wet and sugary where walnuts are dry, so they may soften the fondant where they touch and leave the outside tacky. It is safer to press pieces into the centre or onto the top than to mix them through the mass.
- Buying and pittingDates of the period were often sold in pressed blocks that had to be picked over for pits and stems. Use whole pitted dates today, and check for stray pits anyway. Snip them with oiled scissors or a lightly oiled knife.
- Keeping them from stickingDust the cut date pieces lightly with confectioners' sugar before setting them into the fondant, and let the finished creams dry on parchment for several hours before boxing.
- Yield and storageA pound of fondant makes roughly 40 to 50 small creams. Store in a single layer in a tin, cool but not refrigerated; humidity is what ruins them.
"Creams" of this sort — hand-rolled fondant centers, sometimes dipped in chocolate, sometimes finished with a nut or a piece of fruit — were the bread and butter of the American candy counter and the commercial bakeshop from the late nineteenth century onward, which is why a pastry cook's manual runs through them as a family of variations rather than as separate recipes. Dates became a plausible substitute for walnuts in that period because Middle Eastern and North African dates were reaching American grocers in quantity as pressed blocks, cheap and reliably sweet; California's own date plantings in the Coachella Valley were only just being established in the same years and would not supply the national market until later. The book's telegraphic style here suggests a reader who already had the fondant in front of him and needed only to be told what to press into it.