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Stewed Figs
Wash figs; cut in pieces; for each cup of figs add one quarter cup cold water, simmer one hour; add sugar and lemon juice if allowed. 1 cup flour 1/2 cup fine oatmeal cup rolled oats 4 tablespoons sugar
A two-line fruit compote, printed here with a stray fragment of the next recipe attached to it. Read the ingredient list of flour, oatmeal, rolled oats and sugar as typographical debris from a neighbouring page, not as part of the figs.
- Which figsAlmost certainly dried figs, given the instruction to wash them and the hour's simmer. Modern dried figs are softer and moister; stem them and quarter them. Fresh figs will collapse to jam long before an hour is up.
- The water is not enoughA quarter cup of water per cup of figs assumes a tight lid and very low heat. Check at fifteen-minute intervals and add water in small amounts; the figs should stay just submerged or they scorch on the bottom.
- TimingAn hour suits hard, dry pressed figs. Today's fruit is usually tender in 20 to 30 minutes, at which point the liquid should be a light syrup. Stop when a fig yields to a spoon without falling apart.
- Sugar goes in last for a reasonSugar last -- Sugar added early can slow the softening of the skins, so holding it to the end with the lemon juice does the fruit no harm. The recipe's own reason for the late addition, though, is the phrase "if allowed" -- a dietary restriction, not a technique.
- "If allowed"The phrase points to invalid cookery, food for someone under a doctor's orders on a restricted diet. Unless you are cooking to such a restriction, use about two tablespoons sugar and the juice of half a lemon per cup of figs, to taste.
- Yield and servingA cup of dried figs makes roughly two servings. Serve warm or cold with cream, or alongside toast at breakfast; the syrup keeps the fruit from drying in the refrigerator for about five days.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, sits at the end of the long American vogue for the chafing dish, a tabletop spirit lamp that let hostesses cook in the parlour and let bachelors and college students cook at all. Stewed figs is the plain nursery-and-sickroom entry, and the aside "if allowed" gives it away as invalid cookery, a genre that took up whole chapters of period manuals in the years when convalescents were fed by rule. Dried figs arrived pressed into blocks or strung in rings from the Mediterranean, and stewing was the standard way to return them to something spoonable. The stray line of flour and oats printed after the instructions looks like an error of some kind — perhaps the opening of another recipe run in where it did not belong, perhaps an artefact of transcription.