{This is a follow-up post from The Search for the Date Accordion. If you missed that post, catch up here}.
In our last post, we left off with a plea for help in finding a lost cookie recipe for a woman named Laura and her 83-year-old mom, Betty. To quickly recap, the challenge was in finding a specific recipe called Date Accordions that was thought to have originated in a 1950s/1960s era women’s magazine. In her inquiry, Laura provided some details. The cookies contained a date and nut filling and a frosted top. They were baked in a long rectangular dish, cut on a diagonal, and enhanced with a decorative green gel.
Laura knew this whole cookie-finding endeavor was a long-shot. Betty was heartbroken over the fact that her recipe was accidentally thrown out last year, as it was a family favorite. One that they especially enjoyed during the holiday season. But the moment I read Laura’s initial email request, I was hopeful that we would be able to reunite Betty with her baking bliss.
If you do a general search for cookie recipes online, Google will return over 1 trillion of them in less than a second. Narrow down the search to 1950s cookies and Google provides over 2 billion options. Narrow that down again to 1950s date cookies and there are just under 3 million recipes to sort through. Match that with the vast number of cookbooks that have been written over the past century, and all the recipes that have been printed in a newspaper, magazine, circular, pamphlet, or advertisement since the 1950s and you can see how daunting this finding mission could easily become.
Searching through online resources and in my archive of recipes, I came up empty-handed, so the challenge was opened up here on the blog and on social media last week. Could the vintage kitchen community help find this recipe and make Betty’s Christmas wish come true?
Well, dear readers, I have a surprise for you. Of all the recipes in all the world and all the ways to discover them, I am so amazed and so happy to share with you the news that in less than 36 hours of the call going out for help, the recipe for the cherished Date Accordions was sought, found and confirmed. What a true feat of seemingly impossible proportions. Like a grand dollop of holiday magic delivered just days before the Christmas of this horrendously difficult year, the tracking down of this elusive cookie recipe was made possible (effortlessly it seemed!) by two very special people.
I’m a big believer in Christmas angels. I always like to credit them when something extraordinary happens during the month of December. And I love the whimsical ways in which they work. Mostly around for fun stuff, for things that make you feel merry and bright, I have found that Christmas angels tend to revel in mystery and prefer to work in ways that can never be predicted, anticipated, or even expected. Of course in this pandemic year, everything has been wonky and nothing has gone the way anybody thought it would. I think it must have been unusual for the angels too. This year, they visited the land of the Vintage Kitchen in a much more apparent way. This Christmastime, the angels came with names, Ken and Cindy, and they came with real-life identities.
Ken, who runs the Instagram account @housestories_ is a fellow researcher at heart. He was the one who found the initial lead via a brief mention in a Google books snippet. He sent this image to me over Instagram…
As you can see in the page 7 block – there is a mention of a recipe called Date Accordions. How exciting! This was the first reference that displayed both the word “date” and the word “accordion” side by side. This image also cited a source – Family Circle and the year 1972.
Family Circle was a very popular women’s magazine that was published between 1932 and 2019. Originally offered for free at Piggly Wiggly grocery stores in the 1930s, the magazine grew to a readership of millions and was delivered to stores and mailboxes across the country for more than seven decades. One of the most favored parts of the magazine was always the recipe section which kept up with food trends, meal planning, evolving kitchen equipment, and festive holiday treats.
In 1972, Family Circle magazine published a 16 volume series called the Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking. This expansive set of cookbooks was intended as a ready reference guide on all things food, containing recipes that had been featured in past issues of Family Circle magazine as well as ones shared by readers from all parts of the United States.
I researched every angle online pertaining to this specific cookbook series and the Date Accordions, but nothing popped up that would yield the complete recipe. The next best thing was to track down the physical books themselves. Fortunately, I found this set on Etsy…
This is where I met Cindy. The entire FC Illustrated Library of Cooking was available in her shop, OftenForgotten. So I sent her a message explaining the situation including the personal mission we were on for Laura and Betty, and the speculation that the recipe might be found inside her book series.
More than happy to help, Cindy sent this photo less than an hour later…
And there it was. The Date Accordions. Green decorating gel and all! So excited to have an actual recipe to send, off it went to Laura with fingers crossed in hopes that indeed this was the one Betty remembered. Meanwhile, the blog post was making its rounds. Readers were sending in recipes featuring all sorts of date-related possibilities. So many of them were close to what Laura initially described but none of them were exact, and none mentioned the lynchpin – the green gel.
On Saturday afternoon, Laura emailed back…
OMG!!! Katherine!!
I just spoke with my mother and that’s it!!!! She is in tears! She wants me to tell you thank you from the bottom of her heart.
She wants you to know how grateful she is for all the hard work you did and to all your readers out there that helped in this effort!I also, would like to thank you and all the people who helped with this. Our moms are so special, they sacrifice so much for their family throughout the years. Now being able to make my mother this recipe for Christmas is a small thing I can do for her thanks to you and your site.Thank you for making our Christmas Miracle come true!
And that my dear readers, is how the Christmas angels work their magic. Or in this case how our Christmas kitchen angels, Ken and Cindy, brought surprise, delight and holiday cheer to an 83-year-old woman named Betty and her family this December.
This has been a rough year for the entire world, full of all sorts of terrible tragedies and sadness and seemingly endless feelings of being stunted, confined, and immobile. Here in the Vintage Kitchen, we are not curing Covid, eradicating hate, or righting all the world’s wrongs, but we did find a lost cookie, which instigated joy. Somehow that feels like a small step forward in the right direction towards a sweeter year ahead.
Cheers to happy endings, to Ken and Cindy who couldn’t have made this post happen without their selfless contributions, and to the rest of the kind-hearted gang (Diane, Corine, Mitchell, Agba, Flo, Marianne, Jorge, Jett, Sofia, Bradley, Pane, Karen, Constantine, Viv and Amy) for your all your efforts in helping to get this lost recipe found.
Most sincerely too, a very special cheers goes out to Betty and Laura and their family. Thank you for making us a part of your holiday season. Hope your date accordions turn out just as you remembered!
In the Vintage Kitchen: Where History Comes To Eat 