Date Cream Pie: or, The simple pleasures that were cheap at the time

I wanted to rescue this recipe from the obscurity of a near-illegible scanning job.

Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, February 2 1934 morning edition, page 5

Date Cream Pie 2 eggs, separated ½ cup sugar ¼ cup flour Pinch salt 1⅓ cups milk ½ cup chopped dates 1 tsp vanilla ½ tsp lemon extract 1 tbsp butter 3 tbsp powdered sugar 1 baked pie shell* Heat oven to 300°. In the top of a double boiler, blend sugar, flour, and salt. Add the milk and the egg yolks, beat well with a whisk until thoroughly mixed. Set over simmering water and cook until thick and creamy, stirring frequently. Add dates, vanilla, lemon, and butter. Mix well, and pour into the pie shell. In a clean bowl, mix egg whites and powdered sugar. Beat until soft peaks form, then spread over the pie. Bake 30 minutes. Let cool before serving. *¾ cup flour and ¼ cup butter will make just the right amount of dough for this recipe. "Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, February 2 1934 morning edition, page 5

Apparently dates were cheaper in the 1930s than they are now. Recipes from the time use dates as any other dried fruit, not as an expensive delicacy. I doubt "Helping the Homemaker" would have printed a pie recipe that would cause the homemaker to dip into next week's grocery money for this week's dessert.

We purchased one of the softer varieties of dates for this recipe, thinking that no one wants hard chunks of dried fruit in their custard pie. Perhaps I overthought this, because I couldn't chop the dates. They turned into a paste instead.

Setting aside our, um, "chopped" dates, we find ourselves making a boiled custard to put them in. I made a mistake at this point. I thought I would add the egg yolk separately from the milk so that I could ensure that it was completely broken up and mixed in. In theory, instead of having bits of unmixed egg floating in the milk and dodging the spoon, we would have everything completely beaten together.

Unfortunately, the egg yolk and sugar turned into little hard clods that no amount of spoon-bashing could fix. It looks like I dropped a lot of yellow putty into the pot, doesn't it?

Fortunately, we could fix our mistakes with the help of modern-day appliances! Someone in 1934 may have needed to throw this out and start over, but we in the 21st century have cheap blenders. Furthermore, we have a dishwasher to put all the blender parts in. After a thirty-second motorized detour, the blender broke up the yolk clods and we were ready to continue the recipe as if our ineptitude never happened.

And now, it was time to bring on the title ingredient! After all, without dates it's just a cream pie. I thought the clumps of mashed dates would naturally break apart as they got heated up. However, they needed a lot of spoon-persuasion to mix with everything else.

After we got past our relatively minor self-inflicted errors, the date cream custard cooked up really nicely. First, it took on this lovely brown sugar color:

Then, it thickened up so well that it put the "cream" in "cream pie." At this point, I did wish I had chosen dates that were firm rather than extra-soft. It would have been nice to have intact date pieces in the custard. Instead, the dates practically dissolved in the pie as it cooked, leaving only skin flecks floating in the cream.

Sooner than I thought, our date cream was ready to go into the pies. Inspired by fellow Pieathlete Taryn from Retro Food for Modern Times, who loves making tiny pies instead of big ones, we got out the cupcake pan instead of a pie pan. If you haven't looked at her blog, you should. She always has such nice recipes, and she makes cooking them an entertaining read.

You will note that to prevent my miniature pies from sticking to the pan, I removed the empty shells after baking, popped them into paper liners, and then put them back into place. That way, the tarts could weld themselves to their containers all they wanted. They would have to cleanly come out of the pan no matter what happened in the oven.

At this point, we had only to prepare the crowning touch for these little pies and then bake them. I have to credit the writers of "Helping the Homemaker." Had we purchased chopped dates instead of cutting them ourselves, and had we also not needed a blender, this entire recipe would have only required two bowls, one wooden spoon, and an eggbeater. 

The recipe tells us to spread the meringue "roughly" over the pie filling. I'm not sure why they didn't want anyone to spend any time making artistic swirls and peaks out of the meringue. Maybe they just wanted to bless the homemaker with a written excuse to just get the pie in the oven as quickly as possible.  Or maybe they didn't want you to feel bad if your meringue-spreading skills were not good. "Helping the Homemaker" wants to make your life easier, not make passive-aggressive snipes at your cooking skills.

I have to say, I like these 1930s pies where the meringue is a thin layer crowning the top instead of a big foamy cloud that practically has nothing to do with the pie beneath it. Mrs. George O. Thurn did the same thing in her custard rhubarb pie recipe from the same year as today's cream of dates. 

The meringue baked into a lovely golden color. I liked the look a lot, even if it goes against current snowy-white meringue aesthetics.

Don't the little pies look cute gathered on a plate?

And to my delight, the custard set firmly enough to cut through it. I've previously mentioned that I don't like pies that are too runny to cut. These are not merely custards in edible bowls, they are sliceable pies!

These tasted a lot more complex than the medium-length ingredient list suggests. You would think I put cinnamon and a little molasses, and a delicate balance of other spices in them. You might taste these and think that the preparation was a lot fussier than "put everything on the stove and stir for a while." The pies tasted a lot like something one might have gotten from one's grandmother who got it from her grandmother. 

If you feel like being extra-fancy, I think these would be really good in puff-paste shells instead of plain pie crust. (Obviously, bake them before filling them.) If dates get cheap again, we will be making more date cream pies!