Exotic, but Familiar, too

Familiar, but exotic, dates are an imported fruit that opens whole new worlds of taste and flavor in sweet and savory recipes. Did you know that dates—the edible kind—number some 600 varieties that are grown world-wide?

I realize that the sweet taste in food is a universal requirement for most people’s enjoyment at any meal. But how can we handle 600 different kinds of sweet from a single source?

For the curious date lovers out there, I suggest entering the world of this book: Hot Date! I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Hot Date! is a joyful romp through everything connected to dates and how we can eat them. Along with all that are illustrations of gardens, journal notes of tours, recipes, and odes to dates.

Contents of the Book

When I saw the cover photo of Hot Date! sweet & savory recipes celebrating the date I just knew the cookbook would be delightful. After all, dates are neutral and pair easily with so many flavors!

Many of us are unfamiliar with the range of recipes that dates have inspired in humans over millennia. But what have those ancient ways got to do with our menu aspirations today? Hot Date! offers an investigation of the sweet fruit in combination with spices, other fruits and vegetables with meats, seafood, vegetables, drinks, and condiments. Virtually all the food-like things we take in, for nutrition and for pleasure.

Sweet savvy from experience

How can we get more savvy about dates? Hot Date! is an invitation to experience the fruit from a very tactile perspective: get into the kitchen and try the first recipe that appeals to you. You might choose one of the 2-ingredient recipes and get to assess your progress in just a few moments!

Most recipes feature a very casual approach, as the author encourages you to get your hands into the dough or dish while making a most unusually flavored sweet or savory dish.

Although any recipe you choose may not require a specific date, you may prefer certain varieties for texture and flavor. I’d interject here that I always go for Medjool dates: their texture is not too chewy, but substantially sweet with a blend-able texture that the more chewy dates don’t have. I’d love add to my experience with dates that are unusual, at least in my kitchen.

Date highlights of a full-course menu

While creating a menu for a special dinner, you might consider dates and chicken, dates and duck, or meatballs, or rib eye steak, or lamb and dates–several ways. And then there’s seafood —shrimp and scallops, salmon, or snapper, and dates. If vegetarian, however, you won’t go hungry. Dates bring out the flavors of bulgur, cauliflower, mushroom steaks.

Have you made date fudge, or dates with chocolate in any form? Such a combo in my opinion, is a match made in heaven. But let’s not stop there, in case your most favorite has not been mentioned—hot fudge, truffles, brownies, halwa, chocolate chip cookies … why not banana pie, upside-down cake, olive oil cake, toffee pudding, or other delights such as Sheer Kurma, or Date Ma’amoul.

Dates have been known to intensify winter month treats, but dates as a year-round accessory to our savory menus is new and exciting.

Conclusions

If all of this has you giddy, though a bit exhausted from sugary delights, take a break and peruse the author’s journal-style illustrations of date palms and data.

No ordinary cookbook, this one has unusual features such as colorful images painted by the author. They beautifully convey the blazing light of warm and dry climates where date palms thrive*. The author’s renditions offer a glimpse into the culture behind dates for any time of day, in almost any form, from chopped to paste or molasses, in sweets and savories, and in drinks and condiments.

Notable Hot Date! Facts About Where Date Palms thrive:

Author Alkhatib’s “An illustrated Guide to Some Key Date Varieties” names and describes the taste-wise details for 58 dates — a small number in reality – and facts like where they are grown worldwide. The guide includes the Abbada date and 8 others from the United States, mostly grown in California and Arizona. These have interesting names originating with the date farmer responsible for the variety: Black 8 Ball, Black gold, Black Laflin, Black McGill, Black Sphinx, and Blond Beauty, Cire, Empress, and Tarbazal.

Of course, we cannot walk into our local market and pick up a bunch of Black 8 Ball Dates — not in many supermarkets at least. As we know, the dates sold are usually limited to Deglet Noor, Medjool, and the like. To that end, the author includes the names and contact information for date importers, usually found online.

In my photo above: yellow or golden-colored dates are fresh. They are not dried before being sold. As a result they are crunchier than the more deeply-colored Deglet noor or Medjool, etc.

Title of the Book Reviewed Above:

Hot Date! Sweet and Savory Recipes Celebrating the Date, from Party Food to Everyday Feasts by Rawaan Alkhatib, 2025. Published by Chronicle Books, San Francisco. 271 pages including index. Illustrations in color by Rawaan Alkhatib and photographs by Linda Xiao.

Review of “Hot Date!”, a cookbook