IN FEBRUARY 2019, I visited the date gardens of the Coachella Valley and chewed the sweet flesh of dates found nowhere else in the world: Empress, Abada, Blonde Beauties, Brunette Beauties, Honey, McGill’s, Tarbazal and Triumph. I had always thought of American cuisine as ever-expanding. Then I realized there are hundreds of plants, animals and food traditions that are disappearing from my country’s food repertoire, including many rare California varieties.
Dates are the edible fruit of a palm tree: wrinkled, generally brown and about 1.5 to 2 inches long. They belong to a category of fleshy fruits known as drupes, which have a single seed or pit. Drupes include coconuts, olives, black pepper, various nuts and stone fruits like peaches. Dates are very sweet, usually about 60%-70% sugars, including sucrose and fructose, but they also contain about 1.5 grams of fiber, a decent amount of potassium and a little bit of protein.
To propagate dates, you can’t plant a date seed. Well, you can, but like many tree fruits, what grows out of that seed is genetically different from the parent. This is one way a plant ensures survival; genetically diverse offspring have a better chance of continuing to grow, adapt and propagate. Most of the trees grown in this way do not produce edible, or at least desirable, fruit. So if you like attributes of one date palm — say, the dates are particularly plump and sweet — you want to plant a sucker instead. Suckers are tiny palm trees that grow out of the base of the parent tree in the first 10 to 15 years of its life. They are chiseled off the base of the palm and planted, and will begin to produce dates in about 10 to 15 years.
The date palm originated in the area that encompasses the Arabian Peninsula as well as what is today Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They grow specifically in places where there is very little rain but access to water in rivers or underground aquifers. Dates were a part of the human diet thousands of years before agriculture. Dental calculus — that’s plaque — recovered from Neanderthal skeletons in Shanidar Cave, Iraq, revealed minute fossilized plant particles from dates. But dates are also some of the world’s oldest cultivated fruit. In fact, no wild varieties exist today; dates only exist within cultivation.
Dates have been grown in the
