Home › Cake Fillings and Frosting › Fig Filling
Fig Filling
1/2 lb. figs, finely chopped 1/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lemon juice Mix ingredients in the order given and cook in double boiler until thick enough to spread. Spread while hot. Figs may be chopped quickly by forcing through a meat chopper, stirring occasionally.
A straightforward cooked fruit filling for layer cakes, and one of the few Victorian cake fillings that needs no eggs and keeps well.
- The figsDried figs are meant, not fresh. Look for soft, pliable Calimyrna or Mission figs; if yours are hard and dry, soak them in hot water for 15 minutes and drain before chopping, or the filling will stay grainy.
- StemmingCut off the tough stem nub from each fig before chopping. It never softens and will show up as a woody fleck in the finished filling.
- Meat chopperThe hand-cranked meat grinder of the period. A food processor does the same work in short pulses; add a spoonful of the sugar to keep the sticky fruit from balling up around the blade.
- Double boilerUsed here because a fig paste this thick scorches on direct heat. A heatproof bowl over an inch of simmering water works the same way; the recipe gives no time, and it may take twenty minutes or more, with occasional stirring.
- Judging thicknessIt is ready when a spoon drawn through leaves a track that holds for a moment. It thickens further as it cools, so stop slightly short of what looks right.
- Spread while hotThe hinge of the recipe. Cooled fig filling stiffens into a paste that tears the crumb of a cake layer; warm, it spreads without dragging.
- YieldNot stated; upwards of a cup, enough to fill a two- or three-layer 8-inch cake. Covered and refrigerated it should keep several days, and can be rewarmed gently to spreading consistency.
Fig fillings turn up in American and British cookery books from the later nineteenth century onward, alongside date, raisin and prune versions, all of them ways of getting fruit flavour into a cake when fresh fruit was unavailable. Dried figs arrived in bulk from Smyrna and later from California, where commercial fig growing expanded sharply around the turn of the century. The double boiler was a common recommendation in household cookery instruction of the period, offering a gentler heat than a coal or wood range gave directly. The suggestion to force the figs through a meat chopper is a sign of the same practical bent.