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Parisian Sweets
Chop equal parts of figs, dates, raisins and nuts together. Knead on a board dredged with confectioner's sugar until well blended. Roll to one-third inch thickness, cut into cubes or rounds, and dip each piece in confectioner's sugar. Store in tin boxes.
An uncooked fruit-and-nut confection of the kind that filled candy boxes and church bazaar tables before commercial sweets were cheap. The whole thing hinges on getting the fruit chopped fine enough to bind into a single paste.
- The hinge: chop far finer than you thinkThe mixture holds together only because the fruit sugars and fig seeds act as the glue. Work it to a coarse, sticky paste — a food processor pulsed in short bursts does in a minute what a chopping knife did in twenty. Stop before it turns to a smooth purée or the pieces will not hold an edge when cut.
- Equal parts by what?The original gives no measure. Weight is the safer reading: 6 oz each of figs, dates, raisins and nuts (1 1/2 lb total) should give somewhere around 50-60 pieces at the stated thickness. Measuring by volume will shift the fruit-to-nut balance, since chopped nuts and chopped dried fruit do not weigh the same per cup.
- FigsDried Calimyrna or Mission figs, stems cut off. If they have gone hard, a ten-minute soak in warm water and a thorough blotting restores them; wet fruit makes a paste that will not firm up.
- DatesPitted dates are standard now; a cook of this period may well have been working with stoned fruit, so check for pits anyway. Medjools are wetter and sweeter than the drier imported dates likelier to be to hand then, so expect a softer paste and lean on the dredging sugar.
- NutsThe recipe just says nuts; walnuts or almonds suit it, and pecans work. Toasting and cooling them first improves the flavour and helps them stay crisp in storage, though the original does not call for it.
- Confectioner's sugarModern powdered sugar contains cornstarch, which is if anything an advantage here: it absorbs surface moisture and keeps the cut pieces from weeping. Dredge the board generously and re-dust the knife between cuts.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll between two sheets of parchment to keep the paste off the pin. A chilled hour in the refrigerator before cutting gives much cleaner edges, then let the pieces come back to room temperature before the final sugar coating.
- Storage and yieldTin boxes with waxed paper between layers, in a cool cupboard; they keep three to four weeks and firm up as they sit. From 1 1/2 lb of total ingredients expect 50-60 pieces.
Confections of this sort — pounded dried fruit and nuts bound by nothing but their own sugar — are among the oldest sweets there are, and appear in American community cookbooks under a variety of names, here Parisian sweets. The French label seems aspirational rather than descriptive; late nineteenth and early twentieth century church and club cookbooks are often said to have attached foreign-sounding names such as "Parisian" to a homely recipe to suggest refinement, much as caterers' menus of the period were written in French. What makes the recipe seem genuinely of its moment is the confectioner's sugar and the tin boxes: finely milled sugar and commercial tins were both widely available by the period, and together they let a cook turn out something that looked like a store-bought bonbon without owning a candy thermometer or a marble slab. Recipes like this one were bazaar staples precisely because they required no fire, no cream and no skill in sugar boiling, and they traveled well to a sale table.