Jump to the Recipe

By the time I started researching Eva Aronson, the author of this issue’s Orange & Date Cake recipe, I had already selected, baked, and enjoyed her delicious recipe. I wasn’t able to find out much about Sister Alice Funderburg, the author of last issue’s Ginger Snaps, but this time I hoped to find a fruitful thread or two. What I found, wasn’t just a thread on Eva, but a whole tapestry - a tapestry with details woven by one of the most iconic and best selling authors from the 1960s.

This issue’s recipe comes from the 1925 edition of "The Ladies Auxiliary to Temple de Hirsch's Famous Cook Book". I selected the recipe for an Orange and Date Cake (also included in the 1916 edition) because in addition to sounding tasty and within my humble baking abilities, it was written by the main complier of the book “Mrs. Sigismund Aronson” aka Eva Aronson. Since the editor of this communal project must have put in countless hours to orchestrate this 400+ page book, it felt fitting to recreate one of her gems. Even better, it seemed like it would go well with an Orange Frosting recipe from Mrs. Samuel Brown, another compiler of the book.

Temple De Hirsh

Temple De Hirsch, or Temple De Hirsch Sinai as it is known today, is a prominent Reform Jewish congregation in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1899, the congregation bears the name of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a visionary philanthropist who supported Jewish immigration to the United States in response to the pogroms and anti-Jewish violence in Imperial Russia during the 1880s.

Many of the original members of Temple De Hirsch fled from persecution against Jews in the late 1800s. They became merchants that helped support Seattle as it grew from a backwater timber outpost with a population under 4,000 in 1885 to a boomtown with over 230,000 residents in 1910.

In addition to being one of the largest Reform congregations in the Pacific Northwest, Temple De Hirsch has quite a few historical claims to fame.

Samuel E. Goldfarb, who composed the iconic Hanukkah song "I Have a Little Dreidel" in 1927 served as the temple’s musical director from 1930 to 1968.

In 1960, a young Jimi Hendrix played his first ever gig in Temple’s Jaffe Room. Between sets, his bandmates fired him for showing off.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Seattle in 1961, religious leaders in Seattle cancelled several of his planned speeches, fearing backlash from their congregations. Temple De Hirsch’s Rabbi Levine immediately extended an invitation, and Dr. King spoke at the synagogue on the evening of November 9th, 1961.

Eva Aronson

Eva W. Aronson (born Morgenstern), 1863 - 1936, was a prominent member of the Jewish community in Seattle in the early 20th century. Her husband Sigismund (Sig) was a fur importer, and an officer of the successful Schwabacher Brothers Hardware Company, which eventually became part of the Ace Hardware cooperative.

Eva was central in many social and philanthropic organizations that provided services to immigrants arriving in Seattle from Turkey, Greece, and other European countries. She was a founding member of the Seattle Section of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) and hosted the first meeting of the at her home in 1900. She was also instrumental in the founding of the Settlement House in 1906, one of the oldest human services agencies in the Seattle region.

I suspect Mrs. Aronson would be pleased to know that the Seattle NCJW and the Settlement House, now known as the Neighborhood House, are still active today, and providing services to address the needs of Seattle’s low-income community members, immigrants, and refugees.

I also suspect she would be interested to know what became of her impressive house on 16th Ave, which was called "The Glory of Capitol Hill" when completed in 1909. The 12 bedroom residence was considered a marvel with "all modern conveniences" and features such as a forty foot square "dancing hall" with a gallery for musicians, in the attic. Today, it is known as the Prag House, a non-profit urban housing coöperative centered on community and sustainability with 12 adult residences of all ages.

In addition to her community work, Mrs. Aronson was obviously quite the culinary contributor as well. In the 1908 edition of the cookbook “One thousand favorite recipes”, which would be called “The Famous Cook Book” in the 1916 and 1925 edition, Eva was the main compiler and contributed over 100 of the 1,000 recipes!

To be fair, not all of those 100+ recipes were as robust nor refined as the Orange and Date Cake.

I’m not ashamed to admit that Eva’s “Watermelon with Brandy” recipe might be the first recipes I’ve encountered in one these old communal, religious cookbooks that I have previously made multiple times. Granted, when I regularly made this “dish” in my 20s, I used large quantities of cheap vodka in place of champagne or brandy, but the basics are the same. Time is a flat and boozy circle.

I should not have been surprised to see such a decadent recipe from Eva. As I learned, she was part of the jet-set of her day and no stranger to brandied indulgence.

“Aunt Eva” & Mary McCarthy

While trying to find out more about Eva, I stumbled upon a blog post where I learned that acclaimed novelist Mary McCarthy (1912 - 1989) was Eva’s great niece, and wrote about “Aunt Eva” in her 1957 coming-of-age memoir in, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.

I was not familiar with McCarthy aside from her hall of fame takedown of playwright Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’." Hellman sued McCarthy for $2.25 million dollars, and their difficult relationship later was later immortalized by Nora Ephron’s play Imaginary Friends.

In her obituary, the NYT said of McCarthy, “In her long and prolific career as a novelist, memoirist, journalist and critic, Miss McCarthy earned recognition for her cool, analytic intelligence and her exacting literary voice - a voice capable of moving from the frivolously feminine to the willfully cerebral, from girlish insouciance to bare-knuckled fury.”

In ''Memories of a Catholic Girlhood'' McCarthy recounts her painful childhood. After her parents died in the flu epidemic of 1918, she lived with various relatives in “almost Dickensian cruelty and squalor,” before eventually being taken in by her maternal grandmother Augusta Morganstern. Augusta was Eva Aronson’s sister, and by the time Mary moved in, Eva was widowed and essentially lived with her sister. Mary had quite a few sharp observations about “Aunt Eva” who’s nature she described as “serene and imperturbable”.

McCarthy even gives the Ladies Auxiliary to Temple de Hirsch’s Famous Cook Book a shout out, “a volume got up for charity and much used in our family — I still own a copy…”

Of course McCarthy was never one to hold back. In a 1963 feature, LIFE magazine celebrated her as the "Lady with a Switchblade", and Aunt Eva did not escape her cuts. McCarthy shared in uncomfortable detail how other family members realized Eva was not as bright as her sisters, and how later in life Aunt Eva suffered “cruelly from indigestion.”

Dates

Back when Eva Aronson was baking this cake for a luncheon, the dates would have definitely been imported. Dates were not successfully grown in the United States until the late 1920s.

Considered the oldest cultivated fruit in the world, dates appear in the fossil record at least 50 million years ago. They were initially grown in the region between Egypt and Mesopotamia, around 4000 B.C.

Dates have a special meaning for both Jewish and Muslim cultural and culinary traditions. The original "apple tree" in the story of Adam and Eve was most likely a date palm. Dates are considered one of the seven holy fruits in Judaism, and in Islam, it is a tradition to break the fast with a date during Ramadan. Historians believe that most biblical mentions of honey (for example, the “Promised Land of milk and honey”) actually refer to a syrup made from dates. This date honey syrup is called "silan" in modern Hebrew and "dibs” in Arabic.

Harvesting dates from palm trees is a lengthy endeavor that involves climbing, hand-pollination, and regular trimming. This process can take seven to 10 years. Early 1900s attempts to grow date palms in the United States were unsuccessful. However, in 1927, Walter Swingle successfully introduced Moroccan Deglet Noor date palms to California. Swingle, an “agricultural explorer” employed by the US government also introduced pistachios to California and played a role in developing the tangelo.

Dates finally gained popularity in the US in the 1920s due to marketing strategies and investment efforts. American households of the time were fascinated by all things Middle East, influenced by books like "One Thousand and One Arabian Nights" and Rudolph Valentino's 1921 silent film "The Sheik." To promote this new exotic fruit, farmers, governments, railroads, and other entities transformed California’s Coachella Valley into a desert paradise, complete with pyramids, camels, and garish roadside attractions.

Cooking the Cake

ORANGE AND DATE CAKE
Cream ¼ cup butter with 1 cup sugar, add grated rind of ½ orange, then 4 yolks beaten, then beaten whites. Add ¼ teaspoon soda to ½ cup orange juice, and add 2 teaspoons baking powder to 1½ cups pastry flour, sifting twice. 

Add these mixtures alternately to egg mixture, adding also 1 cup stoned and quartered
dates which have been floured with 2 tablespoons flour. Bake in 2 pans and put together with this filling, putting some also on top

Filing: Three-quarters cup sugar. 3 tablespoons flour, grated rind of 1/2 orange, 3/4 cup orange juice, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 egg slightly beaten, 1/4 cup chopped dates. Mix all well together and cook in double boiler 10 minutes, stirring constantly Cool before spreading.

Mrs. S. ARONSON

ORANGE ICING NO. 1
Half cup melted butter, 2 cups powdered sugar; beat well
together, add grated rind of 1 orange and enough juice to spread easily.

MRS. S. BROWN.

The first step with older recipes is to convert it to something that my 2024 cooking brain has a chance of following. This one is fairly straightforward without any tricky conversions.

Orange and Date Cake with Orange Icing

Ingredients:

- 1/4 cup butter
- 1 cup sugar
- Grated rind of 1/2 orange
- 4 egg yolks, beaten
- 4 egg whites, beaten
- 1/4 teaspoon soda
- 1/2 cup orange juice
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 1/2 cups pastry flour
- 1 cup stoned and quartered dates, floured with 2 tablespoons flour

Filling:

- 3/4 cup sugar
- 3 tablespoons flour
- Grated rind of 1/2 orange
- 3/4 cup orange juice
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice
- 1 egg, slightly beaten
- 1/4 cup chopped dates

Orange Icing:

- 1/2 cup melted butter
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- Grated rind of 1 orange
- Orange juice (as needed for spreading consistency)

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).
2. In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add the grated orange rind.
3. Add the beaten egg yolks and mix well. Then fold in the beaten egg whites.
4. In a separate bowl, dissolve the soda in the orange juice. In another bowl, sift together the baking powder and pastry flour twice.
5. Alternately add the orange juice mixture and the flour mixture to the egg mixture. Mix until well combined.
6. Gently fold in the floured dates.
7. Divide the batter evenly between two greased and floured cake pans. Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
8. Meanwhile, prepare the filling. In a double boiler, combine the sugar, flour, grated orange rind, orange juice, lemon juice, beaten egg, and chopped dates. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 10 minutes. Allow to cool before spreading.
9. Once the cakes are baked and cooled, spread the filling between the layers and on top of the cake.
10. To make the orange icing, beat together the melted butter, powdered sugar, and grated orange rind. Add enough orange juice to achieve a spreading consistency.
11. Spread the orange icing over the top of the cake. Slice and serve.

As in common in old recipes, there’s zero instructions on how to bake. No guidance on temperature, nor time. I looked up a few modern date cake recipes and ended up estimating a bake at 350 for 25-30 min. The actual bake took closer to 35 min but your mileage may vary.

I didn’t have any good pastry or cake flour, so I used a soft all purpose, stone-milled flour from local Red Tail Grains. Eva probably used a more industrial bulk flour. In the late 19th century, stone-milled flour was largely replace by the more industrial flour milled on porcelain rollers. This flour kept longer and was sold in bulk. As prescribed, I sifted the flour and baking soda twice.

The recipe called for “Orange rind”, but I went ahead and just used the zest. Modern recipes distinguish between the two, but from some research and the context I figured zest would be fine for both cake & icing.

The dates are floured with 2 tablespoons of flour, to prevent them from sticking together. I didn’t try it for this recipes, but I’ve read that soaking the dates in milk or orange juice before flouring will add even more flavor and sweetness. I used large Medjool dates for this recipe. It’s likely that Eva used imported Medjool or the smaller and less sweet Deglet Noor dates. 

Once it was thoroughly mixed together, I divvied out the batter into two 9 inch cake pans. I used a ladle that belonged to my grandmother for the task. I have fond memories of this simple plastic handled kitchen tool being used for punch or soup.

Even though I thought I had greased the pans well, the baked cakes were difficult to remove. I ended up using a trick my grandmother showed me when I was a kid. If you methodically and patiently (patience is hard for me) levering a fork around the pan edges, the cake will eventually come free. I also immediately went to amazon and ordered some springform pans.

While the cakes cooled, I mixed the ingredients for the filling. Instead of a double boiler, I just used a metal food storage container elevated by a mason jar ring in large sauce pan. By now the house smelled of warm sweet orange.

I spread the filling between the cake layers and on top. The halved and quartered dates worked well, but if I was making this again and planned to use icing, I’d chop the dates smaller for the filling to make everything more uniform.

I loved that the orange zest was still visible in the icing. It prepared the mind & tastebuds for citrus. I couldn’t help myself, so I added some more dates and a little edible chamomile flower as extra decoration.

The cake was moist and not too heavy. If anything, I baked the cakes too long and made the filling too runny. The orange flavor was strong without going over the top. I served this at a neighborhood brunch and both kids and adults enjoyed it. It would have been fine without the icing, but the extra orange buzz was fun. Excited to make this again!

My copy of the “Famous Cook Book” was once given to a Marge Coleman by a Mrs. C Harness in 1960. The circumstance of the gift is unknown, but Mrs. Harness wrote: “Best of luck. Very economical”. I hadn’t seen an advertisement that also served as an inscribable book plate before, but it’s a smart choice from the National Grocery Distributors and Reliance Coffee.

Thank You

Thank you each and every one of you for subscribing and reading this issue. This one took way longer to write than I expected, but I hope you enjoyed the rabbit holes and side quests. If you have any feedback or requests or old cookbook stories I’d love to read them.

Thank you to Coralie Kwok for the encouragement & parchment paper tips. Special thanks to Adam Soclof for sparking my interest in early 1900s Jewish communal charity cookbooks.

Most importantly, thank you to Eva Aronson, Mrs. S. Brown, the The Ladies Auxiliary to Temple de Hirsch, Marge Coleman, Mrs. C Harness and everyone else who perfected, documented, distributed and preserved these recipes.

I wish that we could all sit outside on a warm spring afternoon and enjoy some cake together. We could talk and share stories until the sun went down and we broke out the brandied watermelon and cards.