Hilda's diary of a Cape housekeeper

Banana Salad. — I see I have also against mayonnaise sauce made note — we have not tried it yet, however — of what a friend told me the other day made a good salad, though it sounds very quaint, and that is mayonnaise sauce over slices of banana. She says apples may also be used with mayonnaise sauce. I believe it is a German plan. Though bananas do not ripen with us, we get such quantities brought to the Cape from Natal that we are always glad to know new ways of using them. June^ 19. — Miss Leisching’s Almond Pudding. — 1 have 153 June ALMOND AND DATE PUDDINGS to-day got two pudding recipes to add to my collection —one IS Miss Leisching’s almond pudding, from an old recipe, as follows. Ingredients I breakfast-cupful of fine bread-crumbs. I pint of sweet milk. I lb. butter (2 ozs. will do). 200 almonds, blanched and minced (or instead 01 this a cupful of desiccated cocoanut). 5 lb. white sugar. 3 eggs. I oz. candied citron. I teaspoonful of finely-pounded cassia. First you soak the bread in the milk, then beat up the butter, sugar, and yolks of the eggs together ; now squeeze the milk out of the bread-crumbs and mix them with the other ingredients and the almonds. Whisk the whites stiffly, and add them, beating all the time. Butter a pudding-dish, pour the mixture into it, and bake for three-quarters of an hour, with a buttered paper over the dish. This pudding may be steamed in a mould instead of baked, and in that case should be garnished with slices of citron preserve. Date Pudding.— The second of Miss Leisching’s recipes is date pudding, for which the list of ingredients is as follows I lb. stoned dates. I lb. chopped suet, with some salt. I lb. sugar. 1 cup of bread-crumbs. lb. flour. 2 eggs. 154 A USE FOR DATE-STONES June i cup of milk. I teaspoonful of mixed ginger and cassia (that is, outer bark of cinnamon) pounded. I wineglass of brandy. “ Mix all these as you would a plum pudding,” the recipe says, “ and pack in a buttered mould ; the pudding should be boiled three hours, and served with ordinary pudding sauce.” (For latter, the one at p. 216 in Hildas Where is it will do.) Use of Dates in Arabia. — Mrs. Theodore Bent, in her book on Southern Arabia, gives a curious account of the use there madfe of dates, which I have her kind permission to quote. She says, “When ripe the dates are put into a round tank, called the madibash^ where they are exposed to the sun and air, and throw off ex- cessive juice, which collects below. After three days of this treatment they are removed and packed for exporta- tion in baskets of palm leaves. The Bahreini, for their own consumption, love to add sesame seeds to their dates, or ginger-powder and walnuts pressed with them into jars. These are called sirah, and are originally prepared by being dried in the sun and protected at night ; then diluted date juice is poured over them. “ The fruit which does not reach maturity is called salang, and is given as food to cattle, boiled with ground date-stones and fish-bones. This makes an excellent cake for milch cows ; this and the green dates also are given to donkeys, and to this food the Bahreini attribute their great superiority. The very poor also make an exceedingly unpalatable dish out of green dates mixed with fish for their own table. “A man on a journey in those parts,” Mrs. Bent says, 155 June DATE AND ORANGE SALAD