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Date Sandwiches
Stone the dates and chop fine. Sprinkle with a little lemon juice and powdered cinnamon. Use bread made of entire wheat flour.
A three-line formula that assumes the cook knows the rest: the dates have to be worked into a spreadable paste, or the filling falls out of the bread. Everything else is seasoning and judgment.
- Entire wheat flourPeriod name for whole wheat flour, so this means whole wheat bread. A dense, close-grained loaf holds the sticky filling better than an airy sandwich loaf.
- Getting a spreadable pasteChopped dates alone stay in lumps. Warm them briefly with a spoonful or two of water, orange juice or the lemon juice until they slump, then mash with a fork or pulse in a processor to a thick paste.
- Dates to useDeglet Noor are firm and only mildly sweet, and chop cleanly. Medjool are softer and sweeter and will need less liquid. Either way check for stray pits after stoning.
- Lemon and cinnamonThe lemon most likely serves to cut the sweetness rather than to add flavor; start with a teaspoon per cup of chopped dates and taste. Cinnamon is easy to overdo in a paste this dense, so a scant quarter teaspoon per cup is enough.
- Butter the breadThe recipe omits it, but a thin film of softened butter or cream cheese on each slice keeps the fruit paste from soaking in and turning the bread damp.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. About 8 oz of stoned dates makes roughly a cup of paste, enough to fill six to eight sandwiches cut in halves or fingers.
- Holding and servingThese improve after half an hour under a damp towel, which softens the crumb against the filling. Trim crusts and cut into fingers if serving with tea; chopped walnuts folded into the paste were a common addition.
Sweet fruit sandwiches were common tearoom and luncheon fare in American cookbooks around 1900, when the sandwich had moved well beyond cold meat. Dates arrived dried and pressed from North Africa and the Persian Gulf and kept well on a pantry shelf. The call for "entire wheat flour" bread points to the health-conscious current of the period, when whole-meal bread was promoted by domestic-science writers as more wholesome than white, and pairing it with fruit rather than meat fits that same programme of lighter, supposedly more digestible eating.