Cheap Dates

Forget sex and money. In this marriage of more than 50 years, the hot issue is pilfering the larder--and a few dates are the stuff of mayhem.

Only Medjool dates will do in my kitchen. Four was all I asked.

I was about to start dinner when I noticed the date crisis. You need four slivered dates for Melissa Clark's Sesame Chicken with Cashews and Dates. Planning ahead, I'd just refilled my date container. We don't get much call for dates around here. But I share this kitchen with someone—and I don't mean the ragged-eared mutt named Casey—who’d developed a yen for them. Melissa specified four dates. I had two.

I'd smashed my garlic, toasted my cashews, measured out my sherry and soy sauce, chopped a generous handful of cilantro. The Instant Pot held basmati rice in salted water, ready for me to press "start." It took me 45 years to learn how much simpler cooking becomes if you prep everything in advance, and I'd been feeling pretty chuffed at this late-life burst of cleverness. Now here I was at approximately 6:57, short two dates.

You might think two dates are no big deal. You'd be wrong. Would you make Marcella Hazan's Stracotto al Barolo, an ambrosial spin on a pot roast, with half a bottle of plonk? Or, for a humbler occasion, tuna casserole without the tuna? (I did once forget the tuna while distracted by a voluble guest, and the resulting casserole was decidedly austere.) If dates appear in the name of the recipe, you'd damn well better have enough. You want them plump and juicy, redolent of caramel. Medjool dates, the kind that passed my squeeze test in a bin at St. Lawrence Market. No fingers, but even with tongs, the choice of a date is an intimate matter.

Off I went to Bulk Barn, two minutes away. An employee looked up from her mop and shrugged. According to a sign on the door, Bulk Barn closes at 9 (Covid hours: a work in progress). Next stop: Rabba, four minutes away. They never close, but among the raisins, banana chips and such I didn't find one container of dates. That left No Frills, where the only dates on offer were the cheap kind, packaged in three-dollar plastic boxes. I didn’t need tongs to know they were barely fit for date bars, which I’ve never made and never will. But by this time two dates were a point of honor. I waited in a snaking line for the privilege of paying $1.50 per date (not so cheap after all). And I still had the scallions to chop.

My two guys share a love of high jinks and food. That’s me on the wall, long ago.

Back home I got busy shredding two wizened dates while my husband considered the sour look on my face, the grim set of my shoulders. "You never told me not to eat those dates," he said mildly. We’ve been through this before. The smoked trout pâté I I meant to spread on a cracker tomorrow, the chunk of well-aged English cheddar I’d been eying for a future breakfast. One of us gets her jollies from the thought of food, the warm notion of it waiting for just the right moment; the other likes to chow down, just because. But Paul had never shown much interest in Medjool dates, and I mistakenly took this for a permanent state of affairs. Things change—human hankerings, retail hours during Covid. A grudge seeped into me like red wine on a linen tablecloth. I brandished my haul of low-end dates. "These aren't any good, but feel free to eat all you want."

My grandmother had a pungent Yiddish saying for such moments—”An ergeneh zach zoll nisht trefen." Literal translation: "A worse thing should not happen." Closer, but short of the mark: "May this be the worst thing that ever happens to you." For the full experience, you need to hear this said by an old Jewish woman of girth, in pin curls, a polka-dot housedress and orthopedic chubatoras, with her hands in a bowl of dough and a headful of memories ranging from the dire (rampaging Cossacks) to the merely harsh (the Great Depression) to the heart-piercingly sad (a husband lost early to Alzheimer's). On my grandmother's roster of emergencies, there wasn't any room for missing dates.

A good dinner knocks the rough edges off a day, and Melissa’s chicken was better than good, especially with the Vouvray Paul chose for the occasion. Who knew what sherry and sesame oil could do for a No Frills date? Paul poured the last of the wine. "You always were a cheap date," he said. "A coffee and a Danish at the Alps Riviera."

“A coffee and half a grapefruit remember? And it wasn't the Alps Riviera. It was that other diner at Bloor and Spadina."

I thought I'd never forget its name. But I had. The Varsity. The Alps Riviera was the more westerly of the two, which I knew only for its appearance in Goin' Down the Road, a 1970 movie about hapless Maritimers adrift in heartless Toronto.

"I'm like Casey," said my husband. "A good boy who sometimes does bad things."

Not that what he'd done was in any way bad. Just annoying. Even funny, when I stopped to think about it.

That night Casey refused to join us in the bed, as he usually does when both of us humans are finally settled there around about 5 a.m. I found him in his favorite corner of the TV couch. Gave him a friendly nudge. He didn't exactly growl, just made it clear he wasn't moving. Why did this surprise me? You can't count on anything to stay the way it's always been.

Your turn now. Got a culinary crisis to share? Or a simmering (so to speak) marital issue that’s not about sex or money? Is dinner to you a devotional affair, a last-minute improvisation or somewhere in between?

Today’s post, written during Covid, is subbing for the new one I couldn’t finish because of a computer problem. Coming soon: my first post about writing, a tribute to a single mesmerizing sentence that’s been ringing in my head for more than 70 years. What can one sentence reveal about writing? Visit me next week. It’s going to be fun.