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Fig Paste for French Cake
One pound of figs, chopped fine, one cup sugar, one-half cup water; boil until to a paste; make French cake in two layers, spread paste between and ice top; boiled frosting is the nicest,
A two-line filling recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what a French cake and a boiled frosting were. The whole of it hinges on how far you cook the figs.
- The figsDried figs are meant, not fresh — a pound of Calimyrna or Mission figs, stems snipped off. Chop them fine before cooking, or better, pulse them in a food processor; the skins of dried figs stay chewy and a coarse chop gives a stringy filling.
- "Boil until to a paste"About 10 to 15 minutes over medium heat, stirring often, until the mixture pulls away from the bottom of the pan in a mass and a spoon drawn through leaves a track. It will be softer hot than cold, so stop while it still slumps slightly; a paste that looks right in the pan sets hard on the layers.
- If it stiffens too farBeat in a spoonful of hot water or lemon juice off the heat until it spreads without tearing the crumb. A little lemon also cuts the flatness of a filling that is otherwise sugar and fig.
- Watch the last minutesOnce most of the half cup of water has gone the sugar scorches quickly. Use a heavy pan and keep the spoon moving toward the end.
- French cakeRecipes under this name vary in American books of the period; some are rich butter cakes, but it is often a white or silver cake made with egg whites only, giving a pale close crumb, which suits a dark fig filling. The recipe gives no baking directions at all, so for a modern substitute any good white layer cake baked in two 8- or 9-inch pans at 350F will do.
- Boiled frostingThe period name for a sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, around 238F, beaten into stiff egg whites — essentially an Italian meringue, and the ancestor of the later seven-minute icing, which is made by a different method. It sets with a thin crisp shell over a marshmallowy interior and is what makes the fig layer read as a dessert rather than a jam sandwich.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of paste, or about two cups — more than enough between two layers. It keeps a week or more covered in the refrigerator and is worth making in full, since the leftover is good on toast.
Fig fillings for layer cakes turn up often in American community and household cookbooks from the 1880s onward, helped along by the dried fig trade: Smyrna figs came in by the boxload from Asia Minor, and California growers were building up their own dried crop, though the large San Joaquin Valley industry selling nationally belongs mainly to the turn of the century and after, once Smyrna-type figs could be grown there. Figs were cheap and keepable enough that a recipe like this assumes you have them on hand and spends its words instead on the cake and the frosting. The pairing of a stiff cooked fruit paste with a bright white boiled icing is characteristic of the period's supper table — the sweetness carried by the filling, the show carried by the frosting, and the cake itself left plain and pale.