It's Date Weekend at the Department of Salad

We're talking about the tree candy, not the marriage rejuvenator.

YOU AND I CAN’T BE FRIENDS IF you don’t like dates. I honestly don’t know what we’d have to talk about. I’m kidding (sort of), but that’s practically the way I feel today.

Many decades ago, though, I was a date novice. I ate them mainly as small, sugar-coated cubes, which came in a flat rectangular box wrapped in a layer of waxed paper, which kept them fresh as a daisy. Not really: they were hard as rocks. These tooth-breaking chunks went into holiday cookie dough along with red and green candied cherries and walnuts; delicious.

Once when I went to my piano lesson, I was treated to whole, chewy dates, which had been stuffed with cream cheese and a single walnut by my piano teacher, who was my idol because she wore beautiful kaftans from India, had a giant velvet ottoman in the middle of her living room covered with an enormous messy pile of ancient National Geographics, and played the cello. One year, one of her nieces showed up at the door during my lesson and my teacher very openly had no idea who the child was. For some reason, I loved her for that.

Dates both sacred (my fancy Medjools, bottom row) and profane (chopped and common grocery store brand, top).

That was practically the full extent of my date exposure while living my somewhat sequestered kid’s life in the Blue Ridge Mountains. And it’s really just in the last 15 years that I’ve become a true date lover and appreciator. Now, I almost always have one or two open packages of Medjool dates, sealed up in a ziplock bag, to eat as treats. I love the creamy-chewy texture—to me they are what caramel and toffee would be if they decided to get together as a single nutritious, soothing fruit.

Meanwhile, California has been hip to the glory of dates for quite some time. In the early 20th century, an agricultural explorer named Walter T. Swingle answered the Department of Agriculture’s call to search the world for profitable crops to nurture here. He returned from Algeria with date palm offshoots, which thrived in the Coachella Valley and eventually set off an American craze for the ancient fruit (thanks in part to some era-expected, culturally insensitive marketing campaigns). You can read about all of that here.

Rows of date trees with protective-sack-covered date clusters, in Palm Springs, California (Getty Images)

This may be why so many Californians don’t play around when it comes to dates—and they don’t want you to either. On Sunday, I’ll have another salad with dates, from a Californian who grew up on them, with some date advice.

But today, I’ve got a salad that enthralled me the moment I saw it in a recent memoir-cookbook I love.