Fig Filling
2 cups figs, chopped cup sugar cup boiling water 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon butter few grains salt Cook ingredients in double boiler until of consistency to spread.
A cooked fig paste for layer cakes, filled cookies and sandwich bars. It is a short list of ingredients whose success rests entirely on how far you cook it down.
- Quantities to watchThe sugar and boiling water are both given without an amount in this text; the fractions appear to have dropped out. For 2 cups of chopped figs, something in the region of half a cup of each is a sensible starting point; start with less water and add more if the mixture stiffens too fast.
- The figsAlmost certainly dried figs rather than fresh, though the recipe does not say. Snip off the hard stem ends before chopping, and chop finer than you think necessary — the pieces soften but never dissolve, and the filling should spread without tearing a cake layer.
- Double boilerThe gentle heat is deliberate: fig paste is thick and full of sugar, and over direct heat it scorches on the bottom long before the middle is cooked. If you use a saucepan instead, keep the heat low and stir constantly.
- Consistency to spreadCook until a spoonful dropped on a cold plate holds its shape and does not weep liquid; the recipe gives no time, and it will depend on the figs. It thickens further as it cools, so stop slightly softer than the final texture you want.
- Lemon and saltBoth are corrective rather than decorative. Dried figs are flatly sweet, and the acid and salt are what keep the filling from tasting like nothing but sugar. Add the lemon juice at the end if you want it sharper.
- Yield and keepingEnough for a two- or three-layer cake or a batch of filled cookies. Refrigerated in a covered jar it keeps several days; it stiffens when cold and spreads best at room temperature.
Fig filling belongs to the era when dried fruit was the reliable sweet in an American pantry all winter, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carried a whole family of cooked fruit pastes — fig, date, raisin, prune — for layer cakes and filled cookies. Commercially, the same idea had already been mechanised: the fig bar machine patented by James Henry Mitchell in 1891, and the Fig Newton that came from it, put an extruded version of this paste into grocery stores, and home cooks went on making it by hand for cakes the machine could not touch.