A dense, moist quick bread sweetened mostly by chopped dates, packed with walnuts or pecans. The teatime and holiday loaf that lets dried fruit do the sweetening work.
Date-nut bread is the gentler holiday loaf — sliced thin for tea, given as a gift, kept on hand for company. Its reliance on dates and nuts rather than heaps of sugar makes it the quiet, more nourishing cousin of the holiday cake table.
This is one of the most rehabilitatable sweets in the canon — dates are a whole-food sweetener carrying fiber, potassium, magnesium, and iron, and the nuts add good fats and minerals. REHAB: let the dates do nearly all the sweetening and add little or no refined sugar; use whole-wheat flour; load the walnuts or pecans heavy; use minimal oil. A no-added-sugar, whole-wheat, date-and-nut loaf is close to an actual nutritious snack — fiber-rich and slow-releasing. It still has natural sugar from the dates, so portion a slice, but this is the kind of 'dessert' that can earn a regular place. The honesty: dates are sugar too, just sugar wrapped in fiber and minerals.
Soak chopped dates in hot water or coffee to soften and dissolve them into a paste, then mix into a batter of flour, egg, a little oil, baking soda, and chopped nuts. Bake at 350°F in a loaf pan for 45-55 minutes until a tester comes clean. The soaked dates provide most of the moisture and sweetness; minimal or no added sugar is needed.
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