Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Fig Toast
Fig Toast
(See cut facing page 198.) Wash carefully and cook in boiling water half a pound of pulled figs until tender; add one fourth a cup of sugar and the grated rind and juice of half a lemon. Cook until the syrup is well reduced.
Cut the crust from a thick slice of bread and sauté to a golden brown, first on one side, then on the other, in two tablespoonfuls of hot butter. Drain the bread on soft paper; then heap the figs upon it, cover with two-thirds a cup of thick cream and a scant fourth a cup of sugar, beaten until stiff.
Serve at once. Prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, or strawberry preserves, may be prepared in the same manner. If preserves be used, omit the sugar from the cream. Sponge cake may be used in the place of bread.
A chafing-dish dessert built on dried fruit and fried bread — essentially a sweet croûte. The whole thing hinges on cooking the figs down to a thick, glossy syrup before they go on the toast; a watery compote turns the bread to mush within a minute.
- Pulled figs"Pulled" figs were dried figs that had been stemmed and worked into shape by hand for packing; they were generally sold pressed in slabs or on strings. Ordinary dried Mission or Calimyrna figs are a reasonable modern stand-in; snip off the hard stems before soaking.
- Soak firstHalf a pound of dried figs simmered straight in water takes a long time to soften. A half-hour soak in warm water cuts the cooking to roughly 20-30 minutes; use just enough water to cover, since the cooking liquid becomes the syrup.
- Reducing the syrup"Cook until the syrup is well reduced" means the liquid should coat a spoon and leave a clear trail when you drag a spatula through the pan. Stop while the figs are still whole and glossy rather than collapsed.
- The creamTwo-thirds of a cup of heavy cream whipped with a scant quarter cup of sugar gives a sweet, soft-peak cream — sweeter than most people whip today. A tablespoon or two of sugar is closer to modern taste, and the recipe itself tells you to leave the sugar out entirely if you use preserves.
- Thick creamIn cookbooks of this period "thick cream" meant cream with a high enough fat content to whip, roughly what heavy or whipping cream is now. Anything labelled light or single cream will not hold.
- The breadA thick slice means a genuine half-inch or more, cut from a firm white loaf, crusts off. Two tablespoons of butter in a hot pan is right — the bread should fry to gold rather than steam, and drain on paper so the base stays crisp under the fruit.
- Chafing-dish sequenceIf you are working at table over a spirit lamp, cook the figs in the blazer first, set them aside warm, wipe the pan, and fry the bread in fresh butter. Whip the cream in advance.
- YieldAs written this makes one generous serving, or two if the slice is split. The fig mixture scales easily; the toast has to be fried and topped to order.
Fried bread under a sweet topping is one of the oldest dessert forms in English cookery, often said to resemble the medieval and Tudor "payn perdu" and its later descendants, though this recipe is not eggy soaked bread but fried bread under fruit. The book belongs to the era of the great American chafing-dish vogue of the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit lamp on the sideboard let a hostess produce hot food after the theatre without waking the kitchen, and store-cupboard fruit that could be pulled from a jar or a box of dried figs suited such cookery well. Pulled figs, many of them imported pressed into boxes and strings, were a standard winter grocery item, and the closing line offering prunes, apricots, peaches, pears or strawberry preserves as substitutes is characteristic of the book: a single method, then a list of whatever the pantry holds.