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To Freshen Figs
Place dried figs in an enamelled colander and steam until soft and filled out in appearance. Remove and prepare further for cooking as desired or roll in confectioners' sugar and set aside to partially dry before serving. A drop of tart fruit-juice and a little sugar may be placed inside the fig.
A short technique rather than a full recipe: steam is used to rehydrate dried figs so they plump back toward their fresh shape. The whole thing depends on gentle, brief steaming.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time, only 'until soft and filled out'. In practice a few minutes over simmering water will do for softer fruit and longer for hard-dried; they are done when the skin looks smooth and taut and the fruit yields easily to a squeeze. Over-steaming leaves them slack and waterlogged.
- The enamelled colanderEnamel was presumably specified to avoid bare or tinned metal reacting with the fruit, though the recipe does not say so. Any stainless or silicone steamer basket set over an inch of simmering water in a covered pan does the same job.
- Confectioners' sugarRoll the figs while still warm and slightly damp so the sugar clings, then leave them on a rack for an hour or two. A second dusting once the first has dissolved into the surface gives a drier, neater finish.
- The fillingTo get the drop of juice inside, slit the fig at the stem end with a paring knife after steaming rather than before, or the cavity fills with steam condensate. Lemon or sour cherry juice suits the flat sweetness of a dried fig better than orange.
- Which figsCalimyrna and other light-skinned figs plump more visibly than dark Mission figs, which stay chewier. Very hard supermarket figs may want a brief soak in warm water first, then steaming.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe states no yield. Steamed figs are best eaten the day they are made; sugared and kept in a tin they should hold a couple of days, though refrigeration tends to make them weep. Three or four figs per person is a reasonable serving as a sweetmeat.
Dried figs were one of the oldest items of long-distance food trade in the Mediterranean, shipped pressed into blocks or strung on strings and rushes, and by the late nineteenth century American households bought them cheaply in boxes from Smyrna. California growers were working to establish the Smyrna fig at about the same period, though the trade name Calimyrna belongs to the early twentieth century, after the caprification problem was solved. A book of fruit recipes from that era can assume its reader has a box of dried figs in the pantry year-round, in a way it could not assume fresh figs, which travel badly and were a local luxury. Hence a whole entry on freshening: steaming was one way to make a stored fruit presentable, whether as a stuffed confection like this one or as a first step before stewing or baking. Rolling the plumped fruit in confectioners' sugar gives something of the look of the crystallised and glace fruits of the professional confectioner.