The people toasting the dates always either explicitly said they were doing this for storability, or implied it.  This practice could have started for another reason, perhaps to a specific variety as Ralph Hancock mentioned in his email to this thread, but this knowledge was lost along the years, and it became related to storage in people's minds.

I have only seen this done with ripened red zagloul dates.

Thanks to all,

Menna

Am Montag, 1. September 2014 schrieb Beatrice Hopkinson :

It could be that the dates were not fully ripe but still yellow needed heating to further ripen them before eating.  When fully ripe there is a lot of sugar in dates so presumably this keeps them for quite a time, and presumably this is not true of dates that have not ripened sufficiently to develop sugar.  The growing of dates apparently requires extreme dry heat in a non-humid atmosphere, in which case they could grow rotten.  Date palms do require water, but only at the roots, so care is taken to keep the dates above dry.

Bea
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Mennat-Allah El Dorry, MA
Institut für Ägyptologie und Koptologie
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
 
"The future of Egypt is not just political reforms, but attitude reforms"

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