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Dates: The Sticky History of a Sweet Fruit

BY PUBLISHED 

Kết quả hình ảnh cho Dried dates for sale at an open-air market in Istanbul, Turkey. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER RYAN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Dried dates for sale at an open-air market in Istanbul, Turkey. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER RYAN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
When Nawal Nasrallah was growing up in Iraq, the last three days of Ramadan were consumed with a singular activity: stuffing dates into rich buttery cookies called ma’amoul.
“We used to gorge ourselves on those cookies,” says Nasrallah, author of the Iraqi cookbook Delights from the Garden of Eden and a small volume on dates. She now lives in Salem, N.H. “I cannot think of Ramadan without dates and at the end having those delicious date cookies.”
Nasrallah is not alone. Dates are key to Ramadan, an annual month-long period of spiritual reflection that began this week. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn to sunset, taking neither food nor water. A date traditionally is the first food to pass one’s lips after the sun goes down. Dates also feature prominently in Eid al-Fitr, the feast that ends Ramadan, when they find their way into items such as Nasrallah’s ma’amoul.
To help American Muslims prepare, date growers in the Southwest’s Bard Valley have shipped more than 500,000 pounds of plump, glossy tree candy over the last couple of weeks to places such as Detroit, Houston and other cities with large Muslim populations. The annual Ramadan spike is second only to the one that happens at Christmas, says David Anderson, marketing director for Bard Valley Medjool Date Growers Association.
“We are knee-deep in filling orders for retailers,” says Anderson, noting that overall production also is up.
The First International Festival of Dates, set in 1921, embraced visions of the Middle East, in this case, Biblical. The festival announced the birth of the date industry through scenes of another birth, the Nativity.

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