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Hard Tack
1/4 lb. (1 cup) stoned, chopped dates 1/4 lb. (1 cup) chopped walnut meats 2 eggs 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 4 OZS. (I cup) flour Pinch salt 1/4 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract Mix the flour, baking powder, salt, add the nuts, dates, extract and the eggs well beaten. Put in a shallow buttered pan and bake in a moderate oven for thirty or forty minutes. When cool cut in short strips and roll in powdered sugar.
This makes a wholesome cake, easily baked and easily served, especially nice with ice cream.
A date-and-nut bar of the type that filled American church cookbooks in the early twentieth century, here given a soldier's joke for a name. The method is terse and leaves one ingredient dangling, so read the points before you start.
- The sugar is missing from the methodThe ingredient list calls for a cup of sugar but the instructions never say where it goes. Mix it in with the flour, baking powder and salt; the batter is essentially eggs binding a sweetened flour-and-fruit mixture.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F (the term covered about 350-375F). At the low end of the 30-40 minute window the centre will still be soft; at 40 minutes it firms up considerably, which may be the point of the name.
- The weights beat the cup measuresTrust the ounces. 4 oz of flour is close to a modern cup (a modern cup runs about 4 1/4 oz), while 1/2 lb of granulated sugar is nearer 1 1/8 cups than the 1 cup the list claims. Weighing gives a batter that holds together properly rather than a dry one.
- Pan size"A shallow buttered pan" is left unspecified; an 8-inch square is a reasonable choice, giving a fairly thin layer. A much larger pan will bake drier and a deeper one will need longer. Lining with parchment saves a good deal of prying.
- Almond extractA teaspoon and a half is assertive by modern standards. A teaspoon is plenty unless you want the almond to dominate the dates.
- Stoned dates"Stoned" simply means pitted. Buy whole dates and pit them yourself if you can; the pre-chopped sugar-dusted kind are drier and will add sweetness the recipe has not accounted for.
- Cutting and sugaringCut while barely warm, not hot and not fully cold. Hot bars tear and cold ones crumble at the edges, and powdered sugar clings better to a surface with a little residual warmth.
- YieldAn 8-inch pan cut into short strips gives about 24 bars. They keep four or five days in a tin and firm up as they sit.
The name is the joke: hardtack was the iron ship's biscuit of flour, water and salt that fed armies and sailors through the nineteenth century, notorious for breaking teeth and harbouring weevils. Calling a rich bar of dates, walnuts and sugar by the same name is the sort of drily ironic titling that one meets in American community cookbooks of the period. The recipe itself belongs to a large family of date-nut bars that spread rapidly once dates became cheap and reliably available in American groceries in the late 1800s. The closing note about serving it with ice cream shows the author thinking of it as a dessert accompaniment rather than a tea cake.