Road Trip to Shield’s Date Garden

A recent road trip to Indio took me Shields Date Gardens – “one of the culinary glories of old California,” according to Jane and Michael Stern of Road Food. The company was founded in 1924 by Floyd and Bess Shields. These days, the shop sells medjool and kadrawi dates, stuffed dates, date cookies, t-shirts, mugs and lots of very random trinkets. They are perhaps best known for their date shakes which are made from date crystals (dried dates) and for the film they show explaining the “sex life of the date.”