The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Versatile fruit treat ripe for sweet and savory recipes. HAVE A GREAT DATE
As the daughter of a mother whose family came to the United States a century ago from Syria, I grew up eating dates. Dates were particularly plentiful during the holidays, when pitted dates were stuffed with pecans and rolled in granulated sugar and appeared in candy dishes on every table. If those stuffed dates had an Arabic name, I didn’t know it. As I think of them now, we could have called them date “truffles,” far easier to prepare than truffles made with chocolate.
We made mamool, cookies stuffed with chopped dates flavored with orange blossom or rose water, and occasionally a platter of date-filled baklava. What I didn’t know then was that at the same time my grandparents were making their way from Syria to Florida, date palms were making their way from Morocco to the United States to begin what would be a century of cultivation in some of the hottest, sunniest parts of the country.
Dates are native to the Middle East and north Africa and were introduced as a possible farm crop for the United States through “agricultural explorers” who were a part of a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that began in the late 1800s. They brought home exotic fruits like mangoes, avocados and new varieties of oranges and introduced them into cultivation. Inthe early 1900s, those explorers brought back offshoots of Moroccan date palms and planted them in areas like the Coachella Valley in California where the palms began to thrive.
Four offshoots of those original palm trees still survive in Bard Valley, California, in what is now the hub of medjool date growing
in the United States. And most of the date palms in cultivation are the offspring of those original trees.
While dates, like most other fresh fruits, are available year-round, their harvest season is from late August through October. The dates you’re most likely to find at the grocery store are medjools with a deep brown, crinkled skin and succulent, sticky flesh. And they’re likely to come from Bard Valley Natural Delights, an association of 13 date growers whose farms span 7,000 acres in southeastern California, southwestern Arizona and parts of Mexico. David Baxter of Bard Valley Natural Delights says the farmers harvest the majority of the medjool dates grown in the United States.
Baxter says dates are not a fruit found in every household, with only about 8% of us enjoying dates regularly. “How you use dates likely depends on who you are. Some consumers enjoy dates as a beneficial snack, some eat them like they would prunes, and some use them in baked goods.” Indeed, in the 1940s, dates were used as a substitute for sugar when sugar was being rationed during World War II.
He says younger customers tend to use them as healthy snacks and often as a sweetener in smoothies. “And isn’t everyone a fan of baconwrapped dates?”
How does Baxter enjoy dates? “I eat them at my desk as a snack during the workday, but my favorite recipe is a half jalapeno, filled with spicy cream cheese and then topped with a date. Wrap that in bacon and grill it. It’s a big hit with all my friends.”