Fig Eclair
1/2 cup butter (scant). 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 1 7/8 cups flour. 17% cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Whites 4 eggs ½ teaspoon vanilla Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. Bake in shallow pans, put between layers Fig Filling, and sprinkle top with powdered sugar.
This page has come down to us incomplete: it is the tail end of a butter-cake formula, and the fat, sugar and liquid that belong at the top of the list are missing. Read it as a variation on the book's basic butter cake rather than a standalone recipe.
- The garbled measurement"17% cups flour" is evidently a corrupted fraction; 1¾ cups is one plausible reading, but the figure cannot be recovered from the page as printed. Treat it as unverified rather than a real quantity.
- What is missingThe fat, sugar and liquid of a butter cake are absent; something in the region of ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar and ½ cup milk would be needed, though the exact amounts are not recoverable from this page. Without them it cannot be baked as it stands; use the book's own butter cake proportions.
- "Mixing butter cakes"Farmer's method is cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then add flour sifted with baking powder alternately with the milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. The whites are folded, not beaten in, or the cake loses its lift.
- Whites onlyFour whites and no yolks make this a white cake, pale and fine-grained. Four modern large whites come to about ½ cup, which is the useful measure.
- Shallow pansTwo 8- or 9-inch round layer pans, greased and floured, suit the quantity. The book gives no oven temperature; a modern equivalent would be around 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the layers pull slightly from the sides.
- Fig fillingThe filling is a separate recipe in the same book: chopped dried figs cooked down with sugar and water until thick and spreadable. It must be cool before it goes between the layers or it will soak the crumb.
- Finishing"powdered sugar" in this period was a fine-ground grade, not identical to modern confectioners' sugar, though confectioners' is the usual substitute. Sift it over the top only after the cake is completely cold, and as near serving as possible.
- YieldTwo layers give roughly ten to twelve slices. Best eaten within a day or so; the fig filling gradually softens the layers.
The name is borrowed rather than literal. An éclair in the French sense is a choux pastry, while this is a plain white butter cake dressed up with a fruit filling; why the name was attached here is not clear. Dried figs were widely available in the period, shipped from Smyrna, with Californian plantings expanding around the turn of the century, and fig fillings turn up repeatedly in the cake and cookie chapters of the era alongside mincemeat and date fillings, dried fruit being shelf-stable and giving a pale cake something to be about.