Applesauce-Date Mallow: or, War rations can't stop the sugar

A quick note before our mallow: Millions of people in the US are losing food benefits. If you are considering buying groceries to drop off at your local food bank, think about donating money directly to them instead. Food banks often buy food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people in charge of food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed. 

Right, on with the applesauce...

I think the mini marshmallow revolutionized Midwestern cuisine.

Applesauce-Date Mallow 2 cups applesauce ½ pound (8 oz) mini marshmallows 2 tsp grated orange rind 1 tsp grated lemon rind* 1 tbsp lemon juice* ½ cup chopped pecans ½ pound (8 oz) pitted dates, sliced (get the soft kind) 1 cup (½ pint) cream, sweetened to taste and whipped† Heat the applesauce until it almost  simmers. (You can either do this on the stove or in the microwave.) Stir in all remaining ingredients except the whipped cream. Let stand at room temperature until it cools completely, stirring occasionally. Then refrigerate overnight. Serve with whipped cream on top. If desired, you can put the mixture into a baked pie crust when it's ready to go into the refrigerator. Chill it overnight, and top it with whipped cream when serving. *Just use the rind and juice of one small lemon. †The rest of this dessert is sweet enough. We recommend either topping this with unsweetened whipped cream, or adding at most a spoonful or two of sugar. Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-1940s (probably 1942-1946)

Isabel Du Bois really sold this recipe hard when she wrote it up. Check out the first sentence in the article: "It's dreamy, it's creamy, this applesauce-date mallow, a dessert you'll not want to miss." And then under the picture: "Apple sauce-date mallow combines the lively tang of apples, the chunky golden sweetness of dates, the crunchiness of nut meats and the creaminess of melting marshmallows into a triumphant dinner menu climax." The whole article sounds like something Chris Farley would have read from a Zagat's restaurant guide.

I love that my great-grandmother rewrote the two ingredients that aren't listed with the others. It reflects the same "planning for my own absent mindedness" that I do.

I couldn't help wondering if "Isabel Du Bois" was the writer's real name. It sounded almost too fancy to be true. Was her real name something a lot more mundane like "Jean Masseth"? I looked her up and found out that "Isabel Du Bois" really was her name. I haven't been this surprised about names since I learned that romance writer Kathleen Woodiwiss actually married a man named Woodiwiss instead of making up a pen name as florid as 1970s bodice-rippers.

I don't have a free Newspapers.com trial anymore, so I can't look up the date for this "triumphant dinner menu climax." But the absence of granulated sugar makes me think it came from World War II. Sugar was very tightly rationed, but sugary foods didn't count against your monthly allowance. This led to a lot of creatitivity with things like marshmallows, condensed milk, sodas, fruit preserves, dried fruit, and corn syrup. Some readers will recall the rationing-era Sugarless Surprise, which was a cake that used corn syrup instead of sugar.

Regardless of whether this was printed during World War II or the Great Depression, you can tell this recipe comes from hard times. Among other signs, you use the rind of both an orange and a lemon, but you don't squeeze the orange. Isabel Du Bois has left us room to make an applesauce-date mallow and still serve fresh oranges later in the day (as long as no one objects to the missing rind). And since few people eat lemons, we are directed to use everything but the pith.

I don't usually make all the ingredients pose together. But today, I wanted to show how the applesauce got title billing but looks absolutely puny next to everything else.

As a recipe note, I used pecans instead of walnuts. Pecans are what walnuts wish they could be. Also, I absolutely detest walnuts in all their forms. Some people have sworn to me that walnuts are delicious right off the tree, and I am willing to keep an open mind. However, there are no walnut trees anywhere near me.

Moving down the ingredient list, the recipe calls for diced marshmallows. I really should have spent the extra 78¢ for mini marshmallows. Cutting these up was by far the most tedious part of this recipe. You can't just snip them; you have to force the blades through the goo. And then you have to peel each marshmallow off the scissors.

After making this recipe, I'm starting to think the introduction of mini marshmallows dramatically changed Midwestern foods. Once people no longer had to wrestle with sticky scissors and gummy fingertips, they could recklessly semi-dissolve marshallows in everything. (Hence the "fruit salad" I encountered in Wisconsin which was made of Cool Whip, mini marshmallows, and canned oranges.) Also, you have to cut through each marshmallow one at a time. Dicing a quarter-pound of them will tire out your hands a lot faster than you think. I don't want to imagine my aching hand if I hadn't halved the recipe.

Fortunately, I happened to own the perfect scissors for this:

 

Those long handles added a lot of extra leverage, which my hand really appreciated by the time we were halfway through these. But the marshmallows made a terrible mess on the blades.

Setting aside the marshmallows, I decided to leave the dates in big-ish pieces. This seemed like one of those recipes that benefits from having different flavors that aren't quite mixed together. (You know how people don't grind chocolate chips into their cookies?)

Incidentally, we had the dates because I flew out to visit a friend who lives in North Carolina a few months ago. As often happens when I go out visiting, we had picked out some random recipes to make together. Among other things, we brought a few recipes to make, one of which involved dates. Then... well, we just didn't bake anything. So I stuffed the dates into my suitcase.

After cutting up everything but the applesauce, we only needed to mix it all together. I know the recipe just says to stir everything all at once, but the marshmallows had semi-coalesced into one big, sticky wad. I decided to forcefully break them up in the applesauce before dumping in everything else.

After our marshmallows were nicely dispersed, we dumped in everything else and stirred a bit. The nuts and dates kept sinking in the bowl. But I figured that as the marshmallows partially melted, they would exude their gelatin into the rest of our so-called "luscious confection." This  would theoretically keep the other goodies suspended in place.

I tried a sample, and the citrus is doing a lot of the work in this. Applesauce on its own is pretty bland (though I've heard that if you make it yourself it actually tastes like apples). The only other ingredients with any actual flavor are the dates and nuts. But adding lemon and orange solved everything. Without them, this would be almost completely blank sweetness.

Our applesauce-date mallow lost a lot of volume as the marshmallows dissolved into everything else. But it also thickened enough that our dates and nuts stopped sinking into the depths. As I transferred the mallow into a smaller container to refrigerate, I had two thoughts: First, it looks surprisingly like the picture in the newspaper. Second, it looks like a dog's dinner.

I tried serving this up in cute glass bowls, just like the recipe said. It didn't help with presentationality as much as I hoped. But before I bemoan this attempt turn marshmallows into a dessert, it's worth keeping in mind that this recipe probably comes from the time of wartime food shortages or the Depression. Either way, I'm pretty sure it is the result of scraping together what was available.

We are told to top this with whipped cream. I added honey instead of sugar to the cream in keeping with  the "sugar-free" theme. I was kind of hoping it would add a bit of flavor, but it didn't. 

After I was done whipping, I did my artistic best to beautify the mallow. Since I was only using a butter knife, my artistic best didn't go very far. But I think that even if I had fashioned a piping tip out of a ziploc bag, it would have merely looked like some rosettes had randomly landed on a pile of slop.

For a dessert that uses no granulated sugar, this thing is intensely sweet. You could probably omit a third of the marshmallows and miss nothing. It's better than I thought it would be, but it is also very rich. I guess that lets the economizing home cook get away with very small servings. Really, it tasted like I should have spiked it with brandy and then spread it between cake layers.

As aforementioned, the citrus is really doing a lot of the work to make this flavorful instead of just a sugar overdose. But when you really get into it, you basically have a sweet mush punctuated by hard nuts. This isn't the recipe's fault, but I should have gone out of my way to get soft dates instead of just blindly purchasing a package of them. My ill-chosen dates only added sad, fibrous interruptions to the rest of dessert. As we learned when we made the date pie, some dates are soft enough to let you appreciate their "chunky golden sweetness" (Isabel Du Bois' words) instead of being like sweetened cardboard in the mallow.

In fairness, I think the flavor of this would have hit different against the backdrop of food shortages. 

For those of us today, it might be a good choice if you actually like camping. It's low-effort and low-utensil. Like, you can just stir everything in a container with a lid, put it in an ice chest in the morning (if you're masochistic enough to forsake indoor plumbing AND voluntarily wake up early), and it would probably be amazing after a hiking trip-- or whatever people do when camping. I've forgotten what you're supposed to do out there. I made a vow at sixteen to never be more than 5 minutes on foot from a hot shower and a flushing toilet.

In closing, if I revisit this recipe, I'm definitely cutting back on the marshmallows.