Walnut Date Bread

Anniversary of the mine collapse. September 12. Thirty-one years since twenty tons of rock sealed me and three other men in a space the size of a living room for seventeen hours. I don't mark it on the calendar. I don't need to. My body marks it — the way my chest tightens in early September, the way I avoid enclosed spaces more than usual, the way I dream about the dark. Not nightmares, not exactly. More like memories that my sleeping brain replays without my permission, rewinding the tape to 1991 and pressing play and making me watch again.

I didn't cook on Monday. Didn't eat much either. Connie knows what September 12 is and she doesn't mention it and she doesn't not mention it — she just exists with a particular attentiveness, a hovering that she'd deny but that I recognize as love in its most practical form. She made grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner because grilled cheese is the food of people who need simple, and I needed simple.

Tuesday I got back to it. Made fried potatoes — Yukon Golds sliced thin, cooked in bacon grease with onion until crispy, salt and pepper. The most basic Appalachian side dish there is. The first thing Betty taught me to cook, when I was eight years old, standing on a step stool at the stove, her hand over mine on the spatula, teaching me when to flip and when to leave alone. Let them get brown, Craig. Don't rush. The potatoes don't care about your schedule. I've been cooking fried potatoes for forty-six years and they still taste like that first lesson — like patience, like trust, like a mother's hand over mine.

Wednesday I drove to the cemetery where the two miners who didn't survive the '91 collapse are buried. Jim Sexton and Roy Howard. They weren't in my tunnel — they were in a different section, a different collapse the same year, the mountain taking two more because the mountain always takes. I stood at their stones and didn't pray because I've never been sure what prayer is, but I stood, and standing is something.

By Thursday the weight had lifted enough that I could stand in the kitchen without feeling like the walls were too close. I didn’t want anything complicated — I’d had enough of complicated for one week. I made this walnut date bread because it’s the same kind of cooking as those fried potatoes: plain ingredients, no fuss, just your hands and a bowl and the smell of something warm filling the house. The dates go soft and the walnuts give it backbone and when you slice it the next morning with coffee, it tastes like you’re going to be all right for a while.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 55 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes | Servings: 10

Ingredients

1 cup chopped pitted dates
3/4 cup boiling water
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Instructions

Soak the dates. Place chopped dates in a small bowl. Pour boiling water over them, stir in the baking soda, and let stand for 10 minutes until softened.
Preheat and prep. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 9x5-inch loaf pan.
Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and brown sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla extract until well combined.
Combine dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and cinnamon.
Mix the batter. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture in two additions, alternating with the date mixture, stirring just until combined after each addition. Fold in the walnuts.
Bake. Pour batter into the prepared loaf pan. Bake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool. Let the bread cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely before slicing.

Nutrition (per serving)

Walnut Date Bread — The Kind of Simple That Holds You Together