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Fig Dessert
2 pounds white figs 2 cups sugar.
Sponge cake Whipped cream Soak the figs over night. In the morning boil slowly until tender; add the sugar and boil until a thick syrup is formed. Line a dish with sponge cake or lady fingers; pour the figs in the center and cover with whipped cream that has been sweetened and flavored. Decorate with candied cherries or angelica.
A charcuterie of a recipe: the ingredient list has been reduced to two lines and the quantities for the figs and sugar are simply absent. Everything else is straightforward, but you are supplying the proportions yourself.
- Quantities are missingThe original names only sponge cake and whipped cream. For a dish serving six, start with about 1 lb (450 g) dried figs and roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, adjusted to taste once the fruit is tender.
- The figsPeriod recipes mean dried figs, and the overnight soak is not optional tlengthy simmering will not soften a hard dried fig on its own. Cover generously with cold water and soak 8-12 hours, then cook in the soaking liquid.
- Simmer, do not boil"Boil slowly until tender" means a bare simmer, 30-45 minutes depending on how dry the figs are. A hard boil bursts them into shreds before the centres soften. Stem them first; snip large ones in half.
- The syrup is the hingeAdd the sugar only after the figs are tender sugar added early firms the skins. Then reduce until the liquid coats a spoon. Too thin and it soaks the cake to mush; too thick and it sets to candy when cold.
- Cool before assemblingThe figs and syrup must be at room temperature or colder before they meet the whipped cream, or the cream will slacken and weep.
- "Line a dish"A glass bowl or a shallow serving dish, cake sliced thin and fitted against the sides and base not a baked charlotte. Nothing goes near the oven.
- Flavoring the creamSweeten lightly and flavor with vanilla, sherry or a little of the fig syrup. A tablespoon of sugar per cup of heavy cream is enough against such sweet fruit.
- AngelicaCandied angelica stems, sold as green strips, are now a specialty item. Candied cherries alone, or thin strips of candied citrus peel, do the same decorative work.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no yield; on the quantities suggested above it will serve about six. Chill at least an hour so the cake absorbs the syrup, and serve the same day, as the cream will not hold overnight against wet fruit.
Dried figs were a staple of the American pantry long before fresh ones were widely shipped, arriving from Smyrna and later from California in pressed cakes or strings and often used as a cooking fruit as well as an eating one -- stewed, baked into puddings, or simmered to a syrup like this one. The dessert itself belongs to the large family of assembled cold sweets built on sponge cake and whipped cream, cousins to the charlotte russe and the trifle, which filled the pudding chapters of household cookbooks in the decades either side of 1900. Their appeal was practical: they used up cake that was a day old, needed no oven in warm weather, and could be made to look formal with a handful of candied fruit.