A Hot, Sweet Date for Tonight

Highlighting Rawaan Alkhatib's exciting new cookbook and her date-flecked bulgur mujadarra

I don’t know if a more Valentine’s Day-appropriate book has ever existed than Rawaan Alkhatib’s incredibly exciting Hot Date! Yet, framing it that way feels gimmicky, because it’s so much more. Thrilling recipes, beautiful photography and illustrations, history, poetry, lush writing, fascinating trivia . . . it’s a feast in every sense.

I’m keeping my intro here short, because in the Q&A below, Rawaan has plenty of wonderful stuff to say about dates (did you know that the date palm is believed to be the oldest cultivated tree in existence?), as well as the sensory side of cookbook writing, the crazy reaches of her research, and much more. I had the good luck to hear her speak at her book launch event recently and am so glad she made time to answer some questions here! I hope you’ll give it a read and make time to savor it.

Then when you’re done, fire up the stove because it’s time to make her Bulgur Mujadarra. This is a classic, everyday comfort dish — aromatic rice and lentils combined with a heap of caramelized onions — but her recipe has got a few twists and tricks (besides dates) that make it an absolute keeper.

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Q&A with Rawaan Alkhatib

Photo by CF Watkins

On top of being full of recipes I can’t wait to make, there is such a rich range of disciplines in your cookbook — your artwork, of course, as well as history, botany, literature, and more. What were your primary influences and what was your research process?

A cookbook is a way of seeing the world and understanding our bodies in relation to it; cooking is a form of time travel as well as a way to move through physical space. My favorite cookbooks are ones that engage all of your senses, that simultaneously transport you and remind you that you are a being in a physical (hungry! salivating!) body. So I wanted to really push at the formal qualities of the idea of the cookbook: what belongs in a cookbook, and what doesn’t? Because I was dealing with a single subject, it felt like I could use that as a prism to refract possibility: as long as it touched upon dates or date palms, it belonged in the book. Of course, I left a lot out, too. There was a months-long period where I was collecting artistic references of date palms throughout history, from cave paintings to Mughal miniatures to World’s Fair posters; I wanted to draw them all as a visual chronology and have a massive fold-out timeline in the book — it turned out to be too expensive to include and also not as cool-looking as I hoped, and it didn’t add anything meaningful to the existing hodgepodge. The same was true for some more esoteric date ingredients — date vinegar or crushed date seed powder (which you can steep to make a “coffee”) or date crystals.

I wanted the book to feel as though every page was a surprise. That you could open it to any spread and find a recipe for something new and really delicious-sounding, or a recipe that was several thousand years old but still sounded pretty intriguing, or an illustrated digression into the various critters that you can find living in an oasis in Abu Dhabi in and among the date groves, or sketchbook pages from site visits, or or or. I wanted to show, not tell, the enormous amount of texture and background in terms of what food is and how it grows and how it reaches our plates.

In terms of research, I was very omnivorous: I wanted to be open to influences from all sides. I read a bunch of scholarly articles with titles like “Date Culture in Ancient Babylonia” or “Assyrian Military Practices and Deuteronomy’s Laws of Warfare” (invading Assyrians would raze their enemies’ date palm orchards to the ground); I scoured poetry anthologies in English and Arabic and French for poetry that referenced dates or date palms; I read recipe books from across the Middle East, but also little mid-century leaflets published by California date growers with recipes for date-nut bread and date-nut cream cheese; I watched a lot of YouTube videos and Instagram reels, set in places like this stupid-beautiful farm in Oman where you can see a green mango & khalal date relish being made. I read a lot of historic recipe books and compilations while chasing down uses of the date that would register as unusual to our modern sensibilities, such as Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook, Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, or Scents and Flavors, a thirteenth-century Syrian manuscript published during the “golden age of cookbooks”. I studied a lot of projects that straddle the line between artists’ books and cookbooks, too: work by Dorothy Iannone, Cipe Pineles, Andy Warhol. Everything felt like it was fair game. I could write ten more books about dates and I'd still have more to say. It's a rich seam!

Is there a perception of dates that you want to challenge?

That they’re only worth eating for their nutritional content! They’re so much more than a substitute for white sugar. Relatedly, I think a lot of people in the US aren’t aware of how many different date varieties exist — and how many are commercially grown and widely available. A visit to almost any Middle Eastern grocery store will usually yield a trove of date types beyond the medjool — particularly over the next few weeks, in the ramp-up to Ramadan (it runs from late February to late March this year).

What should people who don't buy dates often look for when shopping? And is buying online the best way to try different varieties?

You want dates that are glossy and still look plump; if they’re dull and rattle around in the box, chances are they’re too dry to eat out of hand (you can probably still cook with them, though). Some crystallization is normal, particularly with certain varieties, like sukkary dates — they’re still good to eat. While dates are extremely shelf-stable, try to look for ones that were packaged relatively recently. It does make a difference.

In terms of finding other varieties, I’m always an advocate for turning to your closest Middle Eastern grocery store, which will almost certainly stock a few varieties of dates, particularly in the lead-up to Ramadan, when dates are a central feature of the iftar table. Otherwise, there are all kinds of places to find dates online: Rancho Meladuco is always a good bet; they sell Barhi dates in season (late summer/early fall, when they’re fresh crispy yellow orbs), and if you’re lucky you can buy a box of their rare and heirloom dates. You can also find some interesting North American varietals online, like Black Gold Dates at Sam Cobb Farms or Black Sphinx Dates from out in Arizona. I like to buy Iranian dates from Persian Basket, particularly mazafati dates. Bateel will ship to the US if you are looking for Arabian Peninsula varieties like the khalas — their stuffed dates are really special. I got on the Natoora train during COVID, and they will often have beautiful soft khadrawy and bonbon dates in stock, which they will deliver to your home along with other seasonal produce. Finally, I haven’t ordered dates from them but I have heard good things about bulk date orders from nuts.com, and they seem to have a bunch of different varieties on their site.

I've always found artists to be excellent cooks because they're so sensory. Does cooking (and cookbook-making) feel like a similar endeavor to other artistic ones of yours?

Both cooking and cookbook-making were/are full-body (and full-brain) endeavors for me. I really enjoyed the challenge of translating all of the sensory information we bring to the kitchen into prose — how we know when something is ready with our eyes, our ears, our noses. The way a sauce thickens, oil floating to the top, bubbles fat and lazily popping, or the way your nose will know a cake is ready in the oven before your conscious mind registers the kitchen timer going off. So much of that work is invisible and not something I’d had to pay attention to before actually attempting to develop recipes that would work for other people in other kitchens. Similarly, I have no formal training in art or illustration, so I cobbled together my own processes over the years. I started filming myself while painting some of the illustrations to see if I could understand those instinctive moves — when to add a new color, how to hold a paintbrush. It’s been really, really fun to pull together all of these different practices, which had previously existed in parallel for me, into one big mixing bowl.

I'm now inclined to roast all of my vegetables with date molasses. How does it behave differently from other sweeteners like maple syrup and honey?

It’s slightly more acidic, so I’ve found that it curdles dairy under some circumstances. Other than that, I find date molasses to be less sweet than either maple syrup or honey, but with a bit more of a presence — just as versatile, but it adds a little bit of funk. I love to use it in savory applications, like marinades or glazes, or as the sweet undertone in a vinaigrette. One of the most delicious applications of date molasses is in a simple dish that you will find on breakfast tables across the middle east: dibs wa tahini. It’s just date molasses swirled into a shallow dish of tahini, eaten with pita bread that you rip apart to dip in. So good. Please try it!

For more information about Rawaan, visit her website or follow her on Instagram