The plain English tea bread of the village hall and the WI stall, dates steeped in hot tea with bicarbonate of soda, walnuts folded through, and no icing of any description
Origin: England
From the journey of Date.
The date and walnut loaf is one of the small number of British baked goods that has never been fashionable and has never gone away. It is on the tea trolley, on the Women's Institute stall, in the hospital canteen, and in the tin at the back of a great many kitchens, cut in thick slices and spread with salted butter, and it is deliberately plain: no icing, no glaze, no fruit on top. Its technique is worth a moment. The dates are chopped, covered with hot strong tea or boiling water, and stirred with a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, which breaks the fruit down and darkens the crumb; the mixture goes into the batter liquid and all. It is the same chemistry that gives sticky toffee pudding its texture, and it is a very old British trick applied to a great many boiled fruit cakes and malt loaves. The result is a loaf that is dense and moist rather than light, keeps for a week, and improves for the first two days. Its history is Victorian and entirely commercial. Dates arrived in Britain in bulk from Basra through the nineteenth century, shipped by British firms out of a Gulf that Britain effectively controlled, and later from Tunisia and Algeria as well. Pressed into oblong wooden boxes with a small two-pronged fork laid on top, they were cheap enough for an ordinary household by the 1880s, and cheapness is what put them into home baking. The walnut, the other half of the loaf, came from the English orchard tradition and from imported Persian and French nuts. The pairing is not sentimental. A date on its own gives a loaf that is sweet and slightly flat; the tannin and the oil of the walnut cut straight through it, which is why the two names have travelled together on this cake for a hundred and fifty years.
This is the same method as a boiled fruit loaf or a malt loaf, and the fruit can be varied. Half dates and half prunes is very good; sultanas make it a different and lesser cake. No icing. A date and walnut loaf that has been iced has become something else and generally something worse. For a richer version, replace 50 ml of the tea with dark rum after the soaking, or brush the cooled loaf with warmed honey. Bicarbonate of soda, not baking powder. It is there for the alkalinity and its effect on the fruit, not primarily for the rise, and the self-raising flour is what lifts the loaf.
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