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Fig Puff
1 cup cream 1 egg-white 1 tablespoon grapefruit marmalade 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Chopped figs Maraschino cherries Shredded almonds Whip the cream until thick. Beat the egg-white until stiff, then combine with the cream and add the sugar and marmalade. Stir chopped figs into the mixture until it becomes very thick. Pack in long-stemmed glasses. This may be garnished by sprinkling the top with macaroon crums. Arrange a half maraschino cherry with radiating strips of almonds in the center of each.
A simple whipped-cream fool of the 1920s, thickened with chopped figs and set in stemmed glasses. One structural element of it does not survive modern food-safety practice.
- Raw egg white is never cookedThe beaten white is folded into cold cream and served straight from the glass, so nothing in the dish ever reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present on the shell and occasionally inside the egg itself. There is no baking, no cooked syrup and no heat step at any point. For a whipped fig cream today, use a current recipe written for uncooked service.
- "Cream" means heavy cream"Cream" means a cream that will whip -- the recipe's own instruction ("whip the cream until thick") settles it. Use modern heavy or whipping cream; light cream and half-and-half will not hold air.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally meant finely ground sugar; it is not certain it means the modern starch-cut confectioners' grade. Either will dissolve in cold cream, where coarse granulated may stay gritty.
- Grapefruit marmaladeA preserve that appears in recipes and preserve lists of the period and is less easily found today. Any bitter citrus marmalade, thinned slightly if very stiff, occupies the same place: it supplies acid and a little bitterness against the sugar.
- The figs do the thickeningThe instruction to stir in figs "until it becomes very thick" is not a garnish step; the figs are what gives the mixture enough body to stand in a stemmed glass rather than slump. The recipe does not say whether they are fresh or dried, though dried figs, which absorb moisture, would thicken it more.
- Macaroon crumbsMost likely the crisp almond kind, dried and crushed, though the recipe does not say; amaretti crumbs are the nearest modern equivalent.
- YieldA cup of cream whipped with an egg white and figs fills about four small stemmed glasses, or three generous ones.
Fig Puff belongs to the long family of English and American "fools" and "puffs" -- fruit stirred into whipped cream and eaten cold, with no cooking and no gelatin. Its garnishes -- the maraschino cherry, the shredded almonds arranged in rays, the crushed macaroon on top, and the long-stemmed glass -- are of a piece with early twentieth-century soda-fountain presentation. Dried figs were an inexpensive pantry staple in this period. Grapefruit marmalade, now uncommon, was sold at the time; American commercial grapefruit growing expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century.