Famous Date Bars and Shakes
My earliest memory of dates (the kind that dangle in clusters from palm trees) goes back to my mother Alice’s kitchen in the 1960s. Recently, I found myself retracing journeys to deserts and desserts made from dates from an oasis in Southern California that I first visited half a century ago. Along the way, I rediscovered my mother’s recipe for date bars. Dates last forever if refrigerated or frozen, just as memories do—carefully stored for years until revisited.
Recently Lewis—a nurse at the Lodge where I share hours with Kit each day—asked, “Do you like dates?” to which I replied, “I love dates.”
He’d been given two bags of pitted Deglet Noor dates and, knowing that I love baking treats for the staff every Saturday, he offered to share some with me. A day later, a generous bag of soft to the touch, light-colored translucent dates that tasted like honey was delivered to Kit’s room. The challenge was on for me to follow the migration of dates grown on desert oases in North Africa from Algeria to Libya and Tunisia to inland oases in the American Southwest where date palms thrive. Most critically, I needed to find my mother’s vintage date bar recipe and attempt to recreate it.
That culinary search led me back to 1973 and my first trip by car across the vast dry expanse of the American Southwest. My sister Kim and I had planned a road trip during our summer vacation from teaching in Belleview, Nebraska. Traveling in my 1970 elm green VW Beetle, we drove 920 miles due south on I-35 from Omaha to San Antonio to visit our parents and grandmother Florence. Granny was a grand storyteller who knew from personal experience that the second leg of our road trip would take us 600 miles across Texas to El Paso and then another 802 miles to Las Cruces, NM, Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, on to Palm Springs, CA and finally Los Angeles and the Pacific.
She’d made the trip by car herself at a time when there was no air conditioning. To stay cool, she explained, travelers hung a tight weave canvas bag filled with water in front of the car’s radiator to take advantage of evaporative cooling. As water swept through the cloth, it cooled the hot desert air passing by. As Kim and I listened to Granny’s story, I envisioned the two of us crossing a dry sandy region as vast as the Great Sahara. South Texas was hot and dry in the summer. What lay ahead of us would surely be much worse.
Our desert crossing turned out to be the perfect time to make a stop at an oasis for a date shake. Hadley’s Fruit Orchards on Morongo Trail in Cabazon, CA is located 16 miles west of Palm Springs on Interstate 10—our route from El Paso to Los Angeles. In the 1970s, Hadley’s date shakes, along with their dried fruits and nuts, were already famous. Founded as a rustic roadside stand in 1931 by Paul and Peggy Hadley, it was purchased in 1999 by the neighboring Morango Band of Mission Indians who offer high quality products online and provide recipes for the date shakes Kim and I sampled half a century ago.
Fast forward to the summer of 1978 when Kit, Hayden, Heidi and I took a 6,000-mile road trip in a VW pop top camper van from Los Angeles to the east coast and back, stopping to camp at hot springs and in corn fields between visits with Salter clan along the way. On the return trip, the four of us stopped for a final swim in the Colorado River. After H & H were caught in an undertow and rescued by K&C, we continued west, stopping for a celebratory date shake at Hadley’s.
Finally, fast forward to February 2024, the bag of Deglet Noor dates that Lewis gave me, and my mother Alice’s Date Bar recipe from the 1960s. Tucked in a box with recipes I began collecting when Kit, Hayden, Heidi and I began our life together following our 1978 road trip, I found the recipe. It’s written in my handwriting on a piece of lined paper torn from a pocket-sized spiral notebook during a trip to San Antonio to visit my parents and Granny. Ragged at the edges, spotted with food stains and faded, it has survived moves with Kit over the past four decades and considerable downsizing in preparation for our 2021 move to Nevada City, CA. Here is Alice Riggs’ Date Bar Recipe that got rave reviews from the staff at the Lodge last week.
Crumble Ingredients:
1 cup packed brown sugar
½ cup butter, softened
1/3 cup shortening (Crisco)
1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ cups quick cook oats
½ teaspoon salt
½ tsp baking soda
Date Filling:
3 cups cut up dates
¼ cup sugar (optional)
1 ½ cups water
Directions:
Preheat oven: 400 degrees F
Grease parchment paper wide enough to overhang a rectangular 13x9x2 pan
Prepare date filling and reserve while making the crumble.
Mix brown sugar, butter, shortening until well blended.
Stir in remaining ingredients until crumbly.
Press ½ crumbled mixture evenly on bottom of pan.
Spoon and spread date filling over crumble.
Sprinkle remaining ½ of crumble evenly over filling and press lightly.
Bake 25-30 mins.
Cut into 36 bars (2” x 1 ½”) while warm.