[Sca-cooks] OP: Chocolate Date Nut Cake

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Ysabeau wrote:
>This sounds like one of my favorite holiday treats. We called it
>polka daters. The recipe I have is for an 9x13 pan and doesn't
>have cocoa in it. It is kind of like a spice cake with dates,
>chocolate chips and nuts in it. Does your recipe call for any
>spices?

Interestingly, in my memory the cake had spices in it, but only one 
recipe for it on the web had any spice in it. I no longer remember if 
my mom's friend put in the spices or if i did it when i started 
making it. If i did it, it would have been either "Pumpkin Spice Mix" 
or just cinnamon. I was only 11 or so, very definitely NOT a cook, 
and living in a suburb of Chicago where people rarely ate garlic and 
didn't know about basil or tarragon.

There is very definitely cocoa in the cake batter. Some recipes 
called it Double-Chocolate Date Cake for that reason.

Most of the recipes say to cook it in a 9X13 pan or a loaf pan, and 
the more i think about it, the more i'm sure i cooked it in the 9X13 
pan.

However, i did find a recipe in my web search that was a little like 
my cake, with dates in the batter, and the chocolate chips in the 
batter too, and some spices, but no cocoa, and maybe some spices in 
the batter, rather like the cake you mention. I think the specific 
recipe i found was called Danish Fruit Cake...

>I have no idea of the origins...it was something my mom learned to
>make when she lived in the hills of West Virginia (Clay County).
>It isn't Christmas for me without it. You might try searching
>through some hillbilly or Appalachian cookbooks or histories. I'm
>trying to think of that project to document these types of things -
>  the Wildfire series?

That's an interesting idea. I'll have to see what the library has.

I mentioned the cake to a friend who thought it sounded very 1950s 
and recalled his mother's red-and-white checked Better Homes and 
Gardens Cookbook. I remembered that one, too. It was a six-ring 
binder with tabbed dividers separating the sections.

Then those Pillsbury Bake-Offs crossed my mind, maybe it was from one 
of them. They published a booklet of recipes after each one. As i 
child i bought a few - never cooked anything, just read the recipes.

Ultimately, i am very deficient in ordinary American cooking, so i 
don't really have a clue as to its source.


Anahita