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Fig Cups
2 tablespoons sugar 1 teaspoon lemon juice ½ cup wine Stuff figs with almonds. Put sugar, lemon juice, and wine in chafing-dish; when heated, add figs, cover, and cook until figs are tender, turning and basting often. Serve with Lady Fingers.
A chafing-dish dessert from the era when the chafing dish was the fashionable piece of tableware. The ingredient list is incomplete — no quantity of figs or almonds is given — so scale to the syrup you have.
- The missing quantitiesTwo tablespoons sugar and 1½ cups wine make a small amount of syrup; as a working guess it will handle something like a dozen dried figs, with one whole almond apiece. The original simply assumes the cook can judge this.
- What a chafing-dish isA shallow metal pan (the blazer) set over a spirit lamp, sometimes above a hot-water bath. Any wide skillet or sauté pan with a lid over low heat does the same job; the point of the original was cooking at the table in front of guests.
- The figsThese are dried figs; the pale Smyrna type sold in pressed layers was the one most commonly stocked, though the recipe names no variety. Modern dried Calimyrna or Turkish figs work; snip off the hard stem tips and cut a slit in the side to admit the almond.
- The almondsUse whole blanched sweet almonds, one per fig. Nineteenth-century recipes sometimes call for bitter almonds as a flavouring; those are not interchangeable and should not be used here.
- The wineUnspecified, but the sugar-and-lemon syrup points to a fortified or sweet wine — port, sherry, Madeira or Marsala. A dry red will need more sugar to balance.
- Heat and timingKeep the syrup at a bare simmer, not a boil, or it reduces to a sticky glaze before the figs soften. The original gives no time, only 'until figs are tender'; in practice expect somewhere in the region of 15 to 25 minutes depending on how dry they are, testing with a knife tip.
- Basting mattersThere is not enough liquid to submerge the figs, so turning and spooning syrup over them is what makes the difference between evenly plump fruit and one leathery side.
- ServingThe original gives no yield; on a couple of figs a head this would stretch to a small table, with the reduced syrup poured over and lady fingers (or any crisp sponge biscuit) alongside. Good warm rather than hot.
This belongs to the chafing-dish vogue that swept American entertaining from roughly the 1890s into the 1910s, when a nickel-plated blazer over a spirit lamp let a hostess cook at the table without servants. The figs themselves would have come dried from the eastern Mediterranean, Smyrna (now İzmir) being the name stamped on the boxes most familiar to American grocers; dried fruit stewed in sweet wine is an old European dessert idea, and stuffing figs or dates with a nut is a habit often said to belong to the same region that grew both. The lady fingers on the side suggest, though they hardly prove, that this was meant as a light supper-party sweet rather than a substantial pudding.