Fig Filling
One-half pound of figs chopped fine, 6 tablespoons of sugar, 1/3 cup of orange juice, rind of half an orange; cook in double boiler until the thickness of cream.
A cake-and-cookie filling of the type that turned up in layer cakes, filled cookies and jelly rolls. The instructions are complete; only a few details need translating.
- FigsThese are almost certainly dried figs, not fresh — half a pound is roughly 1 1/2 cups chopped, somewhere between a dozen and twenty figs depending on size and variety. Snip off the hard stem ends before chopping.
- Chopping made easierDried figs gum up a knife. Oiling the blade lightly, or pulsing them in a food processor with a spoonful of the sugar, keeps them from clumping into a single mass.
- The double boiler is not optionalFig paste with this little liquid scorches fast over direct heat, and scorched fig tastes bitter through the whole cake. Gentle steam heat is the point of the method; if you use a saucepan instead, keep it very low and stir constantly.
- "Rind of half an orange"Grated zest only, avoiding the white pith. From a medium orange that is about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons. A vegetable peeler plus a fine chop works if you have no rasp grater.
- Timing and the doneness cueThe recipe gives no time; expect somewhere around 15 to 25 minutes over simmering water. "Thickness of cream" most likely means a thick, pourable cream — it should coat the spoon and fall in a ribbon rather than run. It firms as it cools, so stop while it still looks slightly loose.
- If it goes too thickThin with a tablespoon of orange juice or hot water at a time. Filling that has set stiff will tear a cake layer rather than spread on it.
- Yield and useAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough to fill a two-layer 8-inch cake or roughly two dozen filled cookies. Spread it cold, and keep it covered in the refrigerator up to a week.
Fig fillings like this one belong to the era when dried fruit was the reliable sweet in an American pantry — figs, dates and raisins kept well and could be turned into a filling quickly without cream or eggs. California's fig orchards, planted heavily in the later nineteenth century, made cheap dried figs a widely available grocery item, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s carry fig fillings, fig bars and fig puddings in numbers. Filled cookies of this kind, two rounds of dough sealed around a strip of cooked fig, closely resemble the commercially baked fig bar, though whether the home version led to the factory one is not established. The orange juice and zest do double duty: they supply the liquid the dried fruit needs to soften and the acidity that keeps the cooked paste from tasting flat.