Home › The Fig › Fig Filling or Jelly for Cake
Fig Filling or Jelly for Cake
Chop or shred one pound of figs and boil until tender in one coffee-cupful of water, in double boiler. Add one and one-half cups of sugar and one teaspoon of vanilla. Boil down until smooth and thick. Spread while warm.
A simple cooked fruit paste that behaves like a thick jam. The only real difficulty is the vessel: the recipe asks you to reduce the mixture in a double boiler, which will not do the job on its own.
- Coffee-cupfulIn American cookbooks of this period a coffee cup is roughly one cup, though slightly smaller cups were common; treat it as 8 fl oz. The figs should be barely covered, so add a splash more water if they sit dry.
- Double boiler vs. reducingWater-bath heat softens the figs gently without scorching, but it will not drive off liquid quickly. Soften them over the double boiler, then finish the sugar stage over direct low heat, stirring, so the mixture actually thickens.
- The figsAlmost certainly dried figs rather than fresh: boiling a pound tender in a single cupful of water suits dried fruit. Pull off the hard stem knobs before chopping, and shred them fine or the filling will be stringy.
- Sugar timingThe sugar goes in only after the fruit is tender. Sugar firms fruit skins, and figs added to syrup at the start tend to stay tough, so the order works in the cook's favour, whether or not it was intended.
- When it is doneCook until a spoon dragged through the pan leaves a track that closes slowly, around jam consistency. Expect roughly 10 to 15 minutes of active reduction after the sugar goes in. It stiffens considerably as it cools.
- VanillaStir the vanilla in at the very end, off the heat, rather than boiling it away with the sugar.
- Spread while warmThis is the hinge. Cold fig paste is stiff enough to tear a cake layer; warm, it spreads with a palette knife. If it sets before you get to it, loosen it over low heat with a teaspoon of water.
- YieldRoughly two and a half to three cups, ample for a two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Keeps a week or more covered in the refrigerator.
Dried figs were a staple of the American pantry, arriving in pressed cakes or strings from Smyrna and, by around the turn of the twentieth century, from California orchards planted with Smyrna cuttings. Their keeping quality made them a useful filling fruit, and fig layer cakes appear in American cookbooks of the period, built on dried fruit a cook could keep on the shelf year round.