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Fig Sandwiches (Stew figs season with wine)
Stew figs, season with wine and lemon juice, and use for a filling for white or graham bread sandwiches.
Lettuce, water cress, sardines, shrimp and oysters may be mixed with French dressing or mayonnaise, and used for filling for sandwiches.
Two sandwich fillings compressed into three lines, with no quantities at all. The fig filling is the one worth making; treat the second sentence as a list of suggestions rather than a formula.
- The figsDried figs are almost certainly meant here, since stewing suits them. Stem about 8 oz, cover with water, and simmer 20-30 minutes until they collapse, then chop or mash to a spreadable paste. Fresh figs, if used, break down much faster and need far less cooking.
- Wine and lemonNo amount is given. Start with 2 tablespoons of sherry, port or Madeira and 1 tablespoon lemon juice per cup of stewed figs, adding the wine off the heat so it keeps its aroma. The lemon is doing real work: stewed figs are cloying without acid.
- Consistency is the hingeThe filling must be thick enough to hold a sandwich together. If the stewed figs are loose, return them to the pan and cook down until a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track, then cool completely before spreading.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf, slightly sweet and softer than a modern seeded wholegrain. Any close-crumbed whole-wheat sandwich bread stands in; avoid anything with large holes, which the wet filling will soak through.
- The savoury fillingsChop the lettuce or cress fine and bind with only enough dressing to coat, or the bread goes limp within minutes. Sardines and shrimp should be drained and flaked; canned sardines and cooked shrimp are the likely intention.
- OystersUse cooked or canned oysters, drained and patted dry, not raw ones. Raw oysters bound with mayonnaise and left standing on a tea table are a food-safety problem, and their liquor floods the bread besides.
- Yield and handlingA cup of fig filling covers roughly eight to ten slices, making four or five sandwiches. Butter the bread thinly first as a moisture barrier, trim crusts after filling, and keep them under a damp cloth until served.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of the period it ranged well beyond the product it was meant to sell. Sandwiches of this kind belong to the early-1900s vogue for afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon, when thin-cut bread with a sweet paste filling counted as a salad-course nicety rather than lunch. Dried figs, imported in pressed blocks and cakes largely from Smyrna, were among the more affordable sweet fruits in an American pantry, which is why they turn up stewed, minced and spiced all through cookbooks of the era; the fig-paste filling was familiar enough by then that the Fig Newton had already been in commercial production for years. The offhand second sentence, sweeping lettuce, cress, sardines, shrimp and oysters into one line, is characteristic of how these books treated sandwiches: not as recipes but as a technique the reader was assumed to have mastered, needing only a nudge toward combinations.