Home › Cake Fillings And Frostings › Fig Filling
Fig Filling
½ lb. figs, finely chopped 1/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lemon juice Mix ingredients in the order given and cook in double boiler until thick enough to spread. Spread while hot. Figs may be chopped quickly by forcing through a meat chopper, stirring occasionally.
A cooked dried-fruit paste for layer cakes, of the kind that once filled fig bars and "fig cake" at church suppers. It is simple, but the fruit-to-liquid ratio in this printing deserves a second look.
- Check the fig quantityOne and a half pounds of figs against only 1/3 cup of water and 1/3 cup of sugar is unlikely to cook down to a spreadable paste; it will stay a dry crumb. Half a pound would match the liquid, and the larger figure looks like a misprint. Treat it as suspect rather than scaling the water up blindly.
- Which figsThese are dried figs, not fresh. Calimyrna or Turkish figs both work; snip off the hard stem nubs before chopping, since they never soften.
- The meat chopperA food processor does the job the hand-cranked chopper did. Pulse rather than run it continuously, or the figs pack into a gummy ball around the blade. A quick dusting of the sugar over the fruit keeps it from clumping.
- Double boiler, and whyFig paste is dense and sugary and will scorch on direct heat before the centre is hot. If you have no double boiler, a heatproof bowl over an inch of simmering water works; the bowl should not touch the water.
- Judging "thick enough to spread"Ten to fifteen minutes, stirring, until the mixture holds a track behind the spoon and no free liquid pools at the edge. It thickens further as it cools, so stop slightly loose.
- Spread while hotThis is the hinge. Cold fig filling tears the crumb off a cake layer. Spread it warm and pliable, and let the assembled cake sit half an hour before frosting so the layers settle.
- YieldWith the half-pound of figs, enough to fill two or three layers of an 8- or 9-inch cake, roughly a cup and a quarter.
Fig fillings turn up throughout American cookbooks of the 1880s onward, and their popularity owes a good deal to the dried fig trade: Smyrna figs arrived in quantity through Atlantic ports, and California growers were establishing their own crop in the San Joaquin Valley through the same decades. A dried fig was a reliable pantry sweet in a household without dependable fresh fruit out of season, and cooked with a little sugar, water and acid it became a filling that kept better between cake layers than a custard or a whipped cream would. The instruction to use a meat chopper is a small period detail worth noticing: the hand-cranked grinder clamped to the kitchen table was one of the few pieces of mechanical help a cook of the period had, and such books often point readers toward it for nuts, cooked meats and dried fruit alike.