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Fig Sandwiches
Put a cupful of figs through the food chopper, add three tablespoons of hot water and mix with enough maple syrup to make the mixture spread easily. Spread between very thin slices of white bread, cut in clover shape.
A tea-sandwich filling of the sort that turns up in summer menus from the 1920s and '30s, when "cool" meant a meal that asked nothing of the stove. It comes together in a few minutes with a food processor.
- Which figsThe recipe almost certainly means dried figs, the standard pantry item of the period — Calimyrna or Mission both work. A cupful, packed, is roughly 5 to 6 oz; snip off the hard stem ends before grinding or they will show up as woody flecks.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder with a fine plate. A food processor does the same job: pulse rather than run continuously, since dried figs will climb into a sticky ball if worked too long.
- The hot water mattersThree tablespoons of hot water softens the figs and lets the mixture take up syrup smoothly. Add it to the ground figs at once, or let very dry figs sit in the water a few minutes first.
- Maple syrupUse real syrup, not pancake syrup, and add it a spoonful at a time. The paste should be spreadable but not loose — a filling that slumps can soak through the thin bread.
- Clover shapeAssemble whole sandwiches, then stamp them out with a clover or three-lobed cookie cutter and discard the crusts. Cutting first and filling after tears the bread.
- BreadA close-grained sandwich loaf, sliced as thin as it will hold together, is what the recipe assumes. Chilling the loaf briefly makes thin slicing easier if you are cutting it yourself.
- Yield and holdingA cupful of figs fills roughly 12 to 16 thin sandwiches. Cover with a damp towel and refrigerate no more than two or three hours; the cut edges dry quickly.
Fig paste sandwiches belong to the era when the afternoon tea sandwich was a fixed part of American entertaining and cookbooks devoted whole chapters to fillings built from dried fruit, nuts and cream cheese. Dried figs were a cheap, shelf-stable staple — California's dried-fig trade had grown into a national business in the early years of the twentieth century — and a hand food chopper clamped to the kitchen table was a common tool for reducing them to a spread. The maple syrup here does double duty as sweetener and binder.