What’s better than pecan pie? Pecan pie with dates!

You’re going to lose an hour on Sunday. Make up for it with pie! And take advantage of the ability to celebrate Pi Day on a natural celebratory day! The last time Pi Day was on a Sunday was 2010; the next time is 2027. Invite friends and family to drop in for a slice.

And if you’re in a state or community that will arrest you because you had people over for pie, make it a good pie.

For the last two Pi Days, I’ve recommended lemon pies, one completely unbaked and one lemon meringue. I thought I’d break it up by recommending a heavier pie, and another one of my favorites. I’ve always been a fan of pecan pies. This ups the pecan pie by adding just about as many dates.

Like the lemon meringue pie that I used for my inaugural Pi Day post, this date pie is from the Southern Living series from the seventies. But where that was from the Buffet book, this is from the actual Pies and Pastries book. It’s from Mrs. Rubye Shepherd of Wills Point, Texas, east of Dallas. The recipe that follows it in the book is another date pie from Floresville. We like our dates in Texas; I bet a whole bunch of date palms died last month in the extended freeze, and I’m also betting there’ll be a whole bunch of new plantings this spring.

My copy of the book is dated 1972. One of the weird things about this particular recipe is the detail. A lot of old cookbooks assume prior knowledge of baking, and leave things out. Not this one:

Beat the egg yolks with salt, then add the remaining ingredients except egg whites and pie shells.

Just in case you were tempted to mix the unbaked pie shell into the filling.¹

I used the same oatmeal pie crust that I used for Southern Living’s Perfect Lemon Pie. This has rapidly become my favorite pastry crust, and a pie like this needs a pastry crust. A nut crust would make it too heavy, and a crumb crust couldn’t support the filling.

The cover of the Southern Living Pies and Pastries Cookbook.

Yes, the seventies.

One of those assumptions about prior knowledge that you can still occasionally see is the use of “dash”, “smidgen”, and “pinch” for measurements. For consistency I use a set of measuring spoons that goes down to a sixty-fourth, and in that set an eighth is a dash, a sixteenth a pinch, and a thirty-second a smidgen. But I’m pretty sure every cook used and uses at least a slightly different definition of those terms, often changing from recipe to recipe.

Mrs. Shepherd’s original recipe makes two pies; I modified it to make one pie, which was as simple as halving each of the ingredients. It called for a pinch of salt, so I’ve halved that to a smidgen.²

This recipe might look like it uses a lot less sugar than is normal for a pecan pie, but dates are nearly all sugar. The dates in this recipe replace about half of the sugar that normally goes into a pecan pie.

The recipe also adds some spiciness, and not just nutmeg and cinnamon. The orange juice and lemon juice were—besides using dates and pecans—part of what drew me to this recipe. I’ve found that when making any standard pecan pie recipe, adding a bit of orange zest seriously enhances the pie’s flavor. So why not juice, too? Turns out to be a great idea.

As you can see in the photo, this pie goes great with whipped cream. Microwave it to reheat it (or eat it warm out of the oven—but wait long enough for the filling to gel just as for pecan pie) and it will be amazing with vanilla ice cream.

The Southern Living Cookbook Library is a great series. One interesting thing about it is the graphic design. As in the cover of the Pies and Pastries book that I’ve included here, none of the books in this series—that I’ve seen—had cover text. The title was only on the spine.³

If you’re looking for an older cookbook series to collect, I can strongly recommend this one.