Pastel de Datil Sudcaliforniano

This cake is from Baja California Sur. Not Baja California, the northern state, the one most people mean when they say Baja. The southern state. The long, dry peninsula of date palms and mission towns where the Jesuit padres planted Medjool palms in the 1700s and where the descendants of those trees still produce most of the dates eaten in Mexico.

The dates come from Comondu, San Ignacio, Mulege. Small oasis towns built around the missions, where palm groves grow in the canyons fed by underground springs and where the harvest happens in late summer and early fall. If you can get dates from these growers, do it. If you cannot, buy the largest, softest Medjool dates you can find. Hard dates will not break down in the soak and the cake will be wrong.

The technique is mission-kitchen practical. Soak the dates in boiling water with a little baking soda to break them down. Cream lard with piloncillo, because that is what the mission kitchens had, and because lard makes a tender cake with a deeper crust than butter ever will. Toast the pecans first or do not bother adding them. Bake until the crumb is dark and dense, then drown the top in a piloncillo glaze that sets into something close to caramel.

My mother never made this cake. She was from Jalisco and Jalisco does not have date palms. I learned it from a senora named Dona Yolanda in San Ignacio who served me a slice with black coffee on her patio in October of 2014, and who wrote the recipe out for me on the back of an envelope while her grandchildren picked dates from the tree in her yard. Cada estado, su propia cocina. This one belongs to the south of the peninsula and to the women who keep the mission tradition alive.