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 > ######################################################################## > > To unsubscribe from the ANCIENT-FOOD-TECH list, click the following link: > > http://listserv.dartmouth.edu/scripts/wa.exe?TICKET=NzM1NTA3IE0uZWxkb3JyeUBHTUFJTC5DT00gQU5DSUVOVC1GT09ELVRFQ0ggIJN4XhFd1Y6n&c=SIGNOFF > -- 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" ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the ANCIENT-FOOD-TECH list, click the following link: https://listserv.dartmouth.edu/scripts/wa.exe?SUBED1=ANCIENT-FOOD-TECH