Phoenix dactylifera, the fruit of a dioecious desert palm. Three relatives matter, and none of them is a substitute: Phoenix theophrasti, the Cretan palm whose genes sit inside every North African date; Phoenix sylvestris, the Indian wild date, tapped for its sap rather than picked for its fruit; and Phoenix canariensis, the ornamental of a thousand seafront promenades, whose fruit is not worth eating.
The date palm is among the oldest cultivated fruit trees on earth, and it is one of the very few whose domestication can be watched happening in more than one place at once. The oldest date stones yet recovered were carbonised on Dalma Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi, and belong to the fifth millennium BCE. Comparable material comes from Ubaid-period sites on the Kuwaiti shore, and populations of genuinely wild Phoenix dactylifera still grow in the wadis of northern Oman. The lower Gulf, in other words, is not merely where the earliest eaters happened to live; it is where the tree itself came from.
Two features of the plant shaped everything that followed. The first is that it is dioecious: male and female flowers grow on separate trees, so a grove needs both, and a grower planting from seed cannot tell which he has until the tree flowers some six or seven years later. Long before anyone understood why it worked, Mesopotamian and Arabian growers were climbing the female palms and tying cut male flower spathes into the crown by hand. That practice, still universal in commercial groves, is the earliest deliberate manipulation of plant reproduction anywhere in the human record, and it is almost certainly what the Assyrian palace reliefs of winged figures attending a stylised tree are showing.
The second is that a date grown from seed is a genetic lottery, and usually a poor one, whilst a date grown from an offshoot at the base of the parent trunk is a clone. Every Medjool in the world is therefore the same tree, propagated sideways for centuries. A date variety is not a type in the loose sense that a Bramley is a type of apple; it is one individual, cut and cut again, and a named date can in principle be traced back to a single ancestral palm in a single oasis.
The fruit itself is really four fruits, and Arabic gives each stage its own noun. Kimri is the hard green immature date, inedible. Khalal is full size and full colour but still crisp and astringent, yellow in a Basran Barhi and scarlet in an Egyptian Zaghloul, and it is eaten with real pleasure at that stage across the Gulf and Egypt whilst being almost unknown in the West. Rutab is the soft, translucent, honeyed stage that will not travel. Tamr is the fully ripe fruit, dried down on the tree or after picking until it keeps for years with no preserving of any kind: the reason a desert crop became a civilisation's calorie store.
Where the palm will grow is fixed by an old Arab formula: it wants its feet in water and its head in the fire of heaven. It needs a water table or an irrigation channel at the root and a long, ferociously hot, rainless summer at the crown, which is why the tree fruits in the Sahara and the Gulf whilst merely standing about decoratively in Nice and Los Angeles. In a classic oasis it grows in three storeys, the palms shading citrus, fig, and pomegranate beneath them, and those in turn shading lucerne, onions, and wheat at ground level.
Whole-genome work published since 2015 has separated the world's date palms into two populations: an eastern one running from the Gulf through Iraq and Iran into Pakistan, and a western one covering North Africa. The split is old, and the western group carries something the eastern one does not, namely a substantial fraction of ancestry, in some trees approaching a fifth of the genome, from Phoenix theophrasti, the wild palm of Crete and south-western Anatolia. The North African date is a hybrid, and the Aegean is therefore part of its origin story in a way that no historical text records and no cook would ever guess.
The palm itself travels badly and slowly, because it travels as a living offshoot needing water at the far end. It spread where irrigation spread: down the Euphrates into Sumer, along the Levantine corridor to Jericho, across Sinai into the Nile Valley, east on Gulf shipping to the Indus, and west along the North African littoral to Carthage and thence into the Saharan oases. Every one of those movements is a movement of people who intended to farm, not of merchants carrying cargo.
What travelled fast, and very far beyond the tree's own range, was the fruit. Islam is the reason. The practice of breaking the Ramadan fast with dates and water, following the Prophet's own habit, gave a desert crop a fixed annual appointment in every Muslim kitchen from Morocco to Java, most of them thousands of miles from the nearest palm. Indonesia and Malaysia are today among the largest importers of a fruit that has never grown in either country. No other ingredient in this atlas owes so much of its distribution to a devotional calendar.
Two later movements put the date somewhere genuinely new. The first was the Phoenician and Carthaginian planting at Elche in south-eastern Spain, extended under Roman Ilici and given its surviving irrigation system by Andalusi engineers: the only date grove of any size in Europe, and still standing. The second was American, and it was deliberate government policy. United States Department of Agriculture plant explorers imported Deglet Noor offshoots from the Algerian Ziban around 1900 and, in 1927, eleven Medjool offshoots from Bou Denib in Morocco, taken out ahead of the bayoud fungus that was then destroying the Maghrebi groves. Very nearly every commercial Medjool now grown in the Americas or in Israel descends from those eleven.
World production runs to something like nine million tonnes a year, and the striking thing about it is how little of it moves. Egypt is usually the largest producer by volume, followed by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, Iraq, and Pakistan, and most of what those countries grow is eaten within a short distance of the palm that grew it. The export trade is dominated instead by two comparatively small producers with a European and American market in view: Tunisia, which ships Deglet Nour, and Israel, which ships Medjool.
Variety is not a detail here, and the differences are large enough to decide a recipe. Deglet Nour, from the Djerid and Nefzaoua oases of Tunisia and the Ziban of Algeria, is semi-dry, amber, and translucent when held up to the light, which is exactly what its name says: it is the date of the European Christmas box, sold still attached to its stalk. Medjool, from the Tafilalt and now from California, Arizona, and the Jordan Valley, is enormous, soft, and dark, and it is what the Anglophone world now means by the word. Barhi from Basra is eaten crisp and yellow straight off the bunch. Ajwa from Medina is small, nearly black, and carries a religious weight no other variety has. Mazafati from Bam in Kerman is so wet that it has to be refrigerated. Aseel from Khairpur in Sindh is dried hard as chuhara and used in South Asian sweets and in the cooking done for new mothers.
Ramadan sets the world's date calendar. Prices, shipping schedules, and the marketing of premium varieties all pivot on it, and the Gulf states in particular run an enormous seasonal gift trade in boxed dates for which no other fruit has any equivalent. The rest of the year the fruit's second life is industrial: paste for baking, syrup for the Middle Eastern breakfast table, and the fast-growing use of date sugar and blended date paste as a whole-food sweetener in Western manufacturing.
Two practical points are worth more than any quantity of tasting notes. First, dates are sold at two quite different moisture levels, and a recipe written for a soft Medjool will not work with a dry Deglet Nour unless the fruit is soaked; conversely a Deglet Nour holds its shape where a Medjool collapses, which is why the Christmas box date is the one to stuff and the Medjool the one to blend. Second, a hard date is not a stale date. It is a tamr, doing precisely what a tamr exists to do, and ten minutes in hot water or hot tea will bring it back.
Historical Journey of Date
Dalma Island & the Lower Arabian Gulf — c. 5000 BCE
The oldest date stones anyone has found were burnt on a small island off the coast of what is now Abu Dhabi. Dalma, a low limestone island in the lower Gulf, has yielded carbonised stones of Phoenix dactylifera from the fifth millennium BCE, alongside Ubaid pottery carried down from Mesopotamia by boat. Sites on the Kuwaiti shore have produced similar material, and wild date palms still grow in the wadis of northern Oman, which is as close to a living ancestor as this crop has.
This coast is therefore the eastern origin: not merely the earliest place the fruit was eaten, but the region the tree came out of. What it became here it has remained. The Gulf kitchen treats the date as a staple rather than a sweet, and the vocabulary reflects it: the fruit is named at each stage of ripening, and the crisp yellow khalal, the honeyed rutab, and the keeping tamr are three different foods bought at three different times of year.
Two preparations show what a staple looks like. Rangina lays whole stoned dates in a dish and pours over them flour that has been toasted slowly in clarified butter until it smells of biscuit, a technique the Gulf uses wherever a sweet is wanted quickly and there is no oven. Mafrookah pounds dates and pistachios with samn and dried rose into a dense sweetmeat for Eid. Both belong to a family of date-and-fat preparations that runs the length of Arabia and is older than any of the empires in this journey.
Eastward, the same coast supplies Al-Ahsa in the Saudi eastern province, the largest oasis on earth, whose Khalas date is the Gulf's benchmark, and whose two and a half million palms are watered from artesian springs. The dates of this shore are the standard against which the rest of the world's are quietly measured, and very few of them are ever exported.
Ur, Uruk & Sumer — c. 4000 BCE
If the lower Gulf is where the palm came from, southern Mesopotamia is where it became an agricultural system. From the fourth millennium BCE the marshland between the Tigris and the Euphrates carried organised date orchards, and the palm, nimbar in Sumerian and gišimmaru in Akkadian, became the second pillar of the economy after barley. The Code of Hammurabi legislates for it: how an orchard is to be planted out on another man's land, how the crop is divided, and what a tenant owes if he neglects the trees.
It is here that the hand pollination of the female palm is first documented, and it is the earliest deliberate control of plant reproduction anywhere. The Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs of winged attendants holding a bucket and a cone before a stylised tree are very probably a religious rendering of exactly that task, performed every spring by men climbing into the crown with a cut male spathe.
The kitchen followed. Date syrup, dišpu, was the region's principal sweetener, and the same word served for bee honey, which is why every ancient Near Eastern text mentioning honey has to be read twice. Date wine was brewed and spiced. And the Old Babylonian tablets record mersu, a confection of dates worked with pistachios and butter, listed among temple offerings and palace rations at Mari and at Ur: one of the oldest named recipes in existence, and still perfectly edible.
The palm also supplied everything that was not food. Its trunks roofed houses in a land with no timber, its fronds were woven into baskets and matting, its fibre became rope, and its stones were burnt for fuel or ground for animal feed. The Sumerian hymns that call it the tree of life are not being decorative.
Jericho & the Jordan Valley — c. 3500 BCE
The date palm moved up the Euphrates and across into the Levantine corridor, and it found in the Jordan Valley a trench two hundred and fifty metres below sea level with permanent springs and a summer hot enough to ripen anything. Jericho is called the city of palm trees in the Hebrew Bible, and the Hebrew for the tree, tamar, is also a woman's name.
By the Hellenistic and Roman periods the Jericho oasis and the shores of the Dead Sea were producing the most expensive dates in the ancient world. Pliny lists the Judean caryotae among the finest varieties known to Rome and describes them as a fruit for the table and for wine alike; Josephus writes of the plantations around Jericho as royal property. When Rome put down the revolt of 66 to 73 CE, the coinage struck to mark it, the Iudaea Capta series, showed a date palm with a mourning figure beneath it, because the palm was what the province was known for.
The honey of the land flowing with milk and honey is very widely read as this: silan or dibs, date syrup, made by simmering and pressing the fruit, and used in the Levant to this day on bread, over tahini, and in the Palestinian and Iraqi sweet kitchen. Ma'amoul, the semolina cookie pressed in a carved wooden mould and filled with spiced date paste, is baked here for Eid al-Fitr and for Easter alike, by Muslim and Christian households in the same week.
The Judean date died out with the groves, and then came back. In 2005 and afterwards, seeds recovered from Masada and from caves near the Dead Sea, radiocarbon-dated to the first centuries BCE and CE, were germinated by Israeli researchers; the resulting palms have flowered and fruited. The Jordan Valley is now planted overwhelmingly with Medjool instead, brought back across the Atlantic from California in the second half of the twentieth century: a Moroccan variety that reached the Levant by way of the Colorado Desert.
Thebes & the Nile Valley — c. 3000 BCE
Dates crossed Sinai into the Nile Valley in the Predynastic period and were fully domesticated in Egypt by the Old Kingdom. The Egyptian word for the fruit, bnrt, is also the word for sweet, which tells you what a sweetener meant in a country with no cane and little honey to spare. Date wine, date syrup, and dates pressed into cakes with figs and spices all appear in tomb goods and offering lists; a basket of them was set beside Tutankhamun.
The palm frond became the hieroglyph for the year, notched once for each month, and the tree itself stood for endurance in a land where almost nothing else fruited without being watered by hand. It is the one crop that would grow on the desert edge, at the margin of the flood, where the barley would not.
Modern Egypt is usually the largest date producer in the world, and its habits are its own. The scarlet Zaghloul of the Delta is eaten crisp at the khalal stage in autumn, sold by the bunch on Cairo pavements and bitten like an apple, which surprises anyone who has only met the fruit dried. The soft Hayany of Sharqia and Sinai is the eating date; the Siwi of Siwa Oasis, out in the Western Desert, is pressed into blocks. Date syrup, dibs al-tamr, remains a breakfast staple, and khoshaf, the compote of dates and dried fruits soaked overnight in rosewater, is on the table at every iftar in Ramadan.
From the Nile the palm went two ways that mattered. West along the Mediterranean littoral it reached Carthage and the Ifriqiyan oases; south-west along the chain of Saharan oases, through Siwa and the Kufra depression, it reached the Fezzan, and from there the caravan roads to the Sahel.
Khairpur & Sindh — c. 2500 BCE
Date stones turn up at Mohenjo-daro, eighty miles down the Indus from Khairpur, in levels of the mature Harappan period. They arrived on the sea route the Mesopotamian texts call the trade with Magan and Meluhha, the Gulf ports shipping east to the Indus delta, and the palm found in lower Sindh the same combination it wants everywhere: a great river to drink from and a summer that reaches fifty degrees.
Four and a half thousand years later Sindh is one of the world's major date regions and Khairpur district alone accounts for the greater part of Pakistan's crop. Its variety is the Aseel, dried hard into chuhara and sold across the subcontinent. That hard dried date is the form South Asia actually cooks with: soaked and ground into the sweet-and-sour chutney that dresses every plate of chaat in north India, simmered into halwa with ghee and milk in Sindhi and Punjabi households, and pressed on new mothers in the winter panjiri, where its iron and its sheer density of sugar are the point.
Across the Rann in Kutch and Saurashtra the same palm gives the Gujarati kharek, and Gujarat has grown it for centuries on the salt-tolerant coastal soils where little else will crop.
One caution belongs here, because the confusion is universal in India. The Bengali khejur gur, the fragrant nolen gur of the Ganges delta winter, is not made from this tree. It is the boiled sap of Phoenix sylvestris, the wild date palm, tapped rather than harvested, and the two products have nothing in common but a genus.
Vai, Crete & the Aegean — c. 2000 BCE
At the eastern tip of Crete, behind a beach at Vai, stands the largest natural palm forest in Europe. Its trees are not Phoenix dactylifera but Phoenix theophrasti, a wild palm named for Theophrastus, who described the palms of the Greek world in the fourth century BCE. Its fruit is small, fibrous, and barely worth eating, and Crete has never had a date cuisine of any kind.
This point is on the map for a genetic reason rather than a culinary one, and it is the single most surprising fact about the ingredient. Comparison of hundreds of date palm genomes has shown that the date palms of North Africa are hybrids: alongside their eastern P. dactylifera ancestry they carry a large and consistent share, in some trees close to a fifth of the genome, inherited from P. theophrasti. The Aegean wild palm crossed into the cultivated crop somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, most probably where Minoan and later Greek and Phoenician shipping met the North African coast, and every Deglet Nour and every Medjool carries the result.
It means that the North African date is not simply the Mesopotamian date moved west. It is a second thing, with a second origin, and the difference is visible in the fruit: the western varieties are drier, firmer, and better keepers than their eastern cousins, which is precisely why they, and not the Gulf varieties, became the dates of world trade.
Nothing was cooked here. What left this coast was pollen.
Bushehr & the Persian Gulf Coast — c. 500 BCE
The palm groves of Khuzestan and the Persian littoral are continuous with those of lower Mesopotamia, and under the Achaemenids they were part of the same irrigated world. Herodotus, describing Babylonia for a Greek audience that had never seen the tree, reports that the inhabitants make bread, wine, and honey from the palm, which is a fair summary of the whole economy in nine words.
Iran is now among the three largest producers on earth, and its varieties are unusually distinct from one another. Mazafati, grown around Bam in Kerman, is almost black, so moist that it is sold chilled and eaten with a spoon. Piarom from Hormozgan is long, thin, and semi-dry, with a caramel taste that has earned it the name chocolate date. Kabkab and Zahedi from Bushehr and Fars are firmer keeping dates, and Sayer from Khuzestan is the one that goes into the export trade.
The Persian kitchen puts them to a use that the Arab kitchen does not: it pairs the date with the walnut, and with cinnamon, and treats the combination as a dessert in its own right. Ranginak is the clearest example. Stoned dates are each given a walnut half, laid tight in a shallow dish, and buried under flour toasted in butter to a deep biscuit brown, then dusted with cinnamon and ground pistachio. It belongs to Bushehr and the southern coast, where the palms are, and it travels north to Shiraz and Tehran as a Ramadan sweet.
The Persian word for the fruit, khormā, went on to become the Turkish hurma and, carried by Indian Ocean trade, the Malay and Indonesian kurma, which is how a Persian noun ended up naming the fruit eaten at sunset across the largest Muslim population in the world.
Tozeur, Kairouan & Ifriqiya — c. 500 BCE
The date reached the Maghreb twice over: as a cultivated tree carried west along the Mediterranean shore from Egypt, and as a set of genes crossing from the wild Aegean palm. Punic Carthage grew it seriously enough that the agricultural treatise of Mago, the one Carthaginian book the Roman Senate ordered translated into Latin after the city was destroyed, dealt with its planting. The palm appears on Carthaginian coinage, and the Greeks called the tree phoînix, the same word they used for the Phoenicians themselves.
South of the coastal plain, in the chotts and oases of the Djerid and the Nefzaoua, the palm found its permanent home. Tozeur, Nefta, Kebili, and Douz, and across the modern border the Ziban oases of Biskra and Tolga in Algeria, form a continuous belt that grows the most commercially important date variety in the world: Deglet Nour, the date of light, so named because a ripe fruit held up to the sun glows amber through its flesh. It is semi-dry rather than soft, which is exactly why it travels, and it is the date that Europe buys, still attached to the stalk, in a long box at Christmas.
The Arab conquest gave the region its lasting kitchen. Kairouan, founded in 670 CE as the first great Muslim city of the Maghreb, is the home of makroudh: a paste of stoned dates scented with cinnamon and orange, sealed inside a semolina dough worked with olive oil, cut on the diagonal into diamonds, fried, and dropped hot into honey. It is sold from stalls the length of Tunisia and Algeria, it is made at every religious feast, and it is the single dish in which the Maghrebi date is not an accompaniment but the entire point.
From here the palm went two further ways. West along the Maghreb it reached the Tafilalt and the Draa in Morocco. North across the sea it reached the Spanish Levante, where Andalusi engineers turned an old Punic and Roman grove into an irrigated palmeral that is still there.
Murzuq & the Fezzan — c. 400 BCE
Between the Nile and the Maghreb runs a chain of oases through the deep Sahara, and the date palm followed it. In the Fezzan of south-western Libya the Garamantes built, from about the fifth century BCE, a civilisation on foggara irrigation: hundreds of miles of hand-cut underground channels tapping fossil water and running it out to gardens at Germa, Murzuq, and Ghat. Dates were the crop that made the system worth the labour, because they keep, and a food that keeps is what allows a settlement to exist a fortnight's march from anywhere.
That is the Saharan logic of this fruit, and it explains the caravan trade rather than merely accompanying it. Dates are dense, sweet, and stable, and a camel can carry them across a desert without spoiling them. The salt roads running south from the Fezzan and from Kawar to Kanem-Bornu and Hausaland moved dates in one direction and salt and slaves in the other; the Kawar oases at Bilma still send dates south by the same route today.
The Libyan kitchen takes the fruit chiefly as syrup. Rub, thick date molasses, is poured over assida, the smooth cooked porridge of sorghum or barley flour that is eaten for the Prophet's birthday, for the naming of a child, and at the end of the Ramadan fast, with a pool of olive oil beside the pool of syrup and no spoon in sight.
No point on this journey has been added further south. Dates are eaten across the Sahel and are still traded down from Kawar, but the Sahelian kitchens do not build a dish around them, and this atlas does not add a journey point for a fruit that is merely present.
Rome & the Roman Empire — c. 100 CE
Rome loved dates and could not grow them. The Italian summer is neither long enough nor hot enough to ripen the fruit, and although ornamental palms stood in Roman gardens, every date on a Roman table had been imported: the prized caryotae from Jericho and the Jordan Valley, and cheaper fruit from Egypt and the North African provinces. Pliny devotes a long passage of the thirteenth book of the Natural History to the varieties, their keeping qualities, and which of them make wine.
In the kitchen the date did two jobs. It was a sweet in its own right, and Apicius records dulcia domestica, in which the stone is drawn out, a nut set in its place, the fruit rolled in salt, and the whole thing warmed through in honey: a dish that survives essentially unchanged in the stuffed dates of the modern Maghreb and the tapas bars of Alicante. And it was a sweetener and a thickener in savoury cooking, dropped into the spiced wine conditum and ground into the sharp sauces that Roman cooks built on fish sauce and vinegar.
Dates were also a formal gift. At the Saturnalia and at the New Year they were given with figs, honey, and a coin, gilded for the occasion, as a wish for a sweet year: a custom Ovid describes and which has an obvious afterlife in the sweets exchanged at feasts all round the Mediterranean.
When the western empire went, so did the trade, and the date became in Europe what it remained until the nineteenth century: an expensive imported curiosity for the confectioner and the apothecary rather than an ingredient. Only in Spain did the tree itself take hold, in a grove the Romans had inherited from Carthage and passed on in turn.
Medina & the Hejaz — c. 620 CE
The oases of the Hejaz, strung along the caravan road that ran north from the Yemen to Syria, were date country long before Islam. Yathrib, the town that became Medina, was known for its palm groves and for the farming tribes who tended them, and the fruit was the staple of the town in a way that grain never could be in that soil.
What happened here changed the fruit's geography permanently. The Prophet broke his fast on dates and water, and the practice became the settled custom of the whole Muslim world; a saying widely transmitted commends the small dark Ajwa of Medina in particular, and Ajwa is priced accordingly to this day. From the seventh century onward, the date acquired a fixed annual appointment in every Muslim kitchen on earth, most of them nowhere near a palm. The Indonesian and Malaysian import trade, the boxed dates of a Lagos market in Ramadan, and the pallets of Tunisian fruit landing at Rotterdam in the weeks before the fast are all consequences of a habit formed in this oasis.
The Hejazi kitchen itself keeps the fruit close to its plainest form. Hais works stoned dates together with clarified butter, toasted crumbs or barley flour, and dried curd, and rolls the paste into balls: the food of travellers and armies in the early Islamic centuries, recorded in the Abbasid cookery books, and still made at home. It belongs to the same family as the Gulf mafrookah and the Babylonian mersu, which is a family a good deal older than any of the three names.
The other fixed pairing is with coffee. Kahwa, pale and cardamom-scented, is never served in Arabia without dates beside it, and neither half of that pairing is regarded as an accompaniment to the other.
Basra & the Shatt al-Arab — c. 800 CE
Where the Tigris and the Euphrates join and run down to the Gulf, the tidal banks of the Shatt al-Arab carried what was, until living memory, the largest date forest in the world: something on the order of thirty million palms, irrigated twice a day by the tide pushing fresh water up the channel. Basra, founded in 638 CE and by the Abbasid period one of the great ports of the Indian Ocean, was built on that forest and shipped its fruit to India, to East Africa, and eventually to Europe.
The Abbasid kitchen used the date at every level. The cookery books of the ninth and tenth centuries call for dibs, date syrup, as a matter of course, and for date paste in pastry. What survives from all of it, and what Iraqis abroad make first when they are homesick, is kleicha: a cardamom and rose-scented dough rolled around a paste of dates and butter, coiled, sliced, and baked, with a walnut version alongside it. It is baked for Eid in enormous quantities and it is, by common consent, the national biscuit.
Basra's varieties are the eastern classics. Zahidi is the firm keeping date, Halawi and Khadrawi the soft eating ones, and Barhi is the great exception, sold on the whole bunch and eaten yellow and crisp at the khalal stage, tasting faintly of coconut. Basran dates went into the Victorian and Edwardian British trade in bulk, shipped by British firms in the decades when Britain dominated the Gulf, and the boxed dessert date of a British Christmas was very often theirs.
The forest is much diminished. Fighting along the Shatt al-Arab between 1980 and 1988 destroyed a great part of it, and salinity, drought, and the reduced flow of both rivers have prevented a full recovery. Iraq, which once supplied most of the world's exported dates, now supplies a small fraction of them.
Sijilmasa & the Tafilalt — c. 800 CE
Sijilmasa, founded in the middle of the eighth century on the northern edge of the Sahara, was the northern terminus of the gold road from the Niger and one of the richest cities in the western Islamic world. It stood in the Tafilalt, an oasis of the Ziz valley, and it stood there because of the palms: a caravan city needs a food that will not spoil, and a garrison of merchants and camel drivers needs feeding all year.
The Tafilalt and the neighbouring Draa valley grow the variety that the English-speaking world has now made its default. Medjool, majhool in Arabic, meaning the unknown, is a very large, very soft, dark date that was for centuries a local and largely un-exported speciality of these oases. In the early twentieth century the Moroccan and Algerian groves were attacked by bayoud, a soil-borne Fusarium wilt that has no cure and to which Medjool is highly susceptible; the variety came close to being lost in its homeland.
The Moroccan kitchen treats dates with more ceremony than most. A guest is met at the door with dates and milk, in the south with a bowl of both put into the hands before a word is spoken. For Eid and for weddings the fruit is stoned and packed with almond paste scented with orange flower water, then rolled in sugar and set out in tiers: tmar mahchi, which does at a Fez wedding precisely what dulcia domestica did at a Roman dinner, with almonds in place of pine kernels and sugar in place of honey.
In 1927 eleven Medjool offshoots were taken out of Bou Denib, on the Algerian border of the Tafilalt, by an agent of the United States Department of Agriculture, quarantined, and planted in the Californian desert. Every commercially grown Medjool in the Americas, and very nearly every one in Israel, descends from those eleven plants.
Elche, Alicante & al-Andalus — c. 950 CE
Europe has one date grove of any size, and it is in the Vinalopó valley behind Alicante. The palmeral of Elche runs to something like two hundred thousand trees inside and around the town, and it is the northernmost commercial date grove on earth. The palms were first planted by Carthaginian settlers, maintained under the Roman colony of Ilici, and turned into the system that survives by Andalusi engineers in the tenth century, who laid out the network of channels drawing brackish water from the Vinalopó and set the trees in rows along the field boundaries where they still stand. The grove was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000.
Elche sells two crops from the same tree. The fruit ripens in a marginal climate and needs a warm autumn to do it, so the harvest is small and local rather than an export trade. The second crop is the leaf: fronds are tied up inside the crown for a year or more so that they grow without light and blanch to a pale ivory, then cut, dried, and plaited into the elaborate palma blanca carried in Palm Sunday processions across Spain and beyond. A palm-frond industry has kept the grove standing through centuries in which the fruit alone would not have paid for it.
The Spanish kitchen inherited the fruit from al-Andalus and then, characteristically, did something entirely its own with it. Dátiles con bacón, a stoned date given an almond and wrapped in a rasher, put briefly under fierce heat until the fat crisps and the fruit collapses, is a fixture of the tapas counter from Alicante to Bilbao. It is a modern dish and makes no claim to antiquity, but the operation it performs on the fruit is exactly the Roman one, and the almond inside it is the same almond.
The date never became a Spanish staple in the way it did in the Maghreb, and no other part of Europe grows it at all. Elche is the exception that shows where the northern limit runs.
London & England — c. 1830 CE
Dates had reached English kitchens by the fourteenth century, and they appear in The Forme of Cury among the costly imports a royal cook was expected to handle. For four hundred years afterwards they stayed exactly that: expensive, occasional, and confined to the confectioner's tray.
What changed was shipping. From the early nineteenth century, and overwhelmingly after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, dates arrived in Britain in bulk from Basra, carried by British firms operating in a Gulf that Britain effectively controlled, and later from Tunisia and Algeria as well. The result was the boxed dessert date, sold pressed into an oblong wooden box with a small two-pronged plastic fork laid on top, which appeared on British sideboards at Christmas for a century and a half and is one of the few genuinely ubiquitous imported fruits of the Victorian working-class table.
Cheapness put the date into everyday baking, and two dishes came out of it that the country now regards as its own. The date and walnut loaf is a plain tea bread in which the fruit is softened first in hot tea or in water with bicarbonate of soda, which breaks it down and darkens the crumb: the standard offering at a village hall, a Women's Institute stall, and a hospital canteen alike. And sticky toffee pudding is a steamed or baked date sponge under a hot dark toffee sauce, which has become, in about sixty years, the most ordered dessert in Britain.
Its origins are much argued over. Francis Coulson served it at Sharrow Bay on Ullswater from the 1960s and said he had the recipe from a Mrs Martin of Claughton in Lancashire, who is said in turn to have had it from Canadian air force officers billeted there during the war; the Cartmel Village Shop version, made in the Lake District from 1989 and sold in tubs, is what put it into every supermarket. The one thing not in dispute is that the fruit doing the work is a Middle Eastern date in an English pudding, and nobody eating it thinks of it as foreign at all.
Indio, the Coachella Valley & California — 1927 CE
The Colorado Desert of southern California is one of the few places outside the Old World that will ripen a date: below sea level in places, blisteringly hot, effectively rainless, and, once the Coachella canal reached it, watered. From the 1890s the United States Department of Agriculture sent plant explorers to North Africa and the Gulf to find varieties for it, and Deglet Noor offshoots from the Algerian Ziban were planted around Indio from about 1900.
The decisive shipment came in 1927. Bayoud disease was sweeping the Moroccan and Algerian groves, and a USDA agent secured eleven Medjool offshoots from Bou Denib in the Tafilalt, which were quarantined and then established in the Californian desert. Nearly a century later, essentially the entire commercial Medjool crop of the United States, Mexico, and Israel traces to those eleven plants, which makes the world's most fashionable date a Moroccan variety preserved by an American quarantine station and re-exported to the Middle East.
The valley built a small culture around the crop, some of it distinctly odd: the date gardens of Indio have advertised themselves with Arabian Nights theming since the 1920s, and the county fair still does. What came out of it that lasted is the date shake, which is nothing more than Medjool dates blended with vanilla ice cream and milk until the fruit has dissolved into a thick, malty, caramel-coloured drink, sold at roadside date gardens along Highway 111 since the 1930s and now a genuine regional dish of the American desert.
The other half of the American date story is not sweet at all. The date's density and keeping quality made it the first fruit the health-food and endurance-sport markets seized on, and the paste, sugar, and syrup made from cull fruit now consume a large share of the Californian crop.
