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Parisian Sweets
1 lb. figs. 1 lb. dates. 1 lb. English walnut meat Confectioners' sugar Pick over and remove stems from figs and stones from dates. Mix fruit with walnut meat, and force through a meat-chopper. Work, using the hands, on a board dredged with confectioners' sugar, until well blended. Roll to onefourth inch thickness, using confectioners' sugar for dredging board and pin. Shape with a small round cutter, first dipped in sugar, or cut with a sharp knife in three-fourth inch squares. Roll each piece in confectioners' sugar, and shake to remove superfluous sugar. Pack in layers in a tin box, putting paper between each layer. These confections may be used at dinner in place of bonbons or ginger chips. A combination of nut meat (walnut, almond, and filbert) may be used in equal proportions, Confectioners' sugar.
A no-cook fruit-and-nut paste, essentially a hand-rolled Lärabar seventy years early. The printed ingredient line here is incomplete, so the proportions are the first thing to settle.
- The missing quantitiesThe text calls for figs and dates in the method but the ingredient list as printed gives only the walnut meat. Fannie Farmer's confection of this type runs on equal weights, so 1 lb dried figs, 1 lb pitted dates and 1 lb walnuts is the safe reading; treat any other ratio as your own invention.
- The hinge: dry fruit, not moistSuccess depends on the figs and dates being firm and leathery rather than plump and sticky. Soft modern Medjool dates and moist-pack figs will give a paste that will not hold a rolled sheet, and no amount of dredging sugar will fix it. Use dry Calimyrna or Turkish figs and Deglet Noor dates.
- "Walnut meat"Simply shelled walnut kernels. English walnut is the ordinary supermarket walnut, as distinct from the black walnut then still common in American kitchens, which is far stronger and would dominate the fruit.
- Meat-chopperA hand-cranked grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor works, but pulse rather than run it: continuous processing heats the nut oil and turns the mixture greasy. Grinding the fruit and nuts together, as directed, keeps the blades from clogging.
- Stones and stemsCheck every date by hand even if the package says pitted; a single missed stone will jam a grinder and chip a processor blade. Fig stems are woody and do not break down.
- Working the pasteConfectioners' sugar is doing two jobs here, sweetening and drying. Keep dredging generously and re-flouring the pin, since the paste sticks to everything as it warms under the hands. Chilling the mass for twenty minutes before rolling makes it much easier to handle.
- Yield and keepingThree pounds of fruit and nuts rolled a quarter-inch thick gives a very large number of three-quarter-inch squares. Layered between parchment in a tin, they keep several weeks at cool room temperature; they dry out rather than spoil, so a tight lid matters more than refrigeration.
- "Ginger chips"Thin slices of crystallised ginger. The recipe offers these sweets in place of bonbons or ginger chips, so they were intended to be served at the end of dinner rather than as a snack.
Fruit-and-nut pastes ground together and rolled in sugar are very old, but this particular type of American confection belongs to the era when the meat-chopper became standard household equipment and cooks discovered it would grind almost anything. The name attaches the sweet to Paris, which in a turn-of-the-century American cookbook was less a claim of origin than a mark of refinement: bonbons, marrons and petits fours all carried the same association, and "Parisian" on a page of the Boston Cooking-School book signals a dish fit for the dessert course of a company dinner. Dried figs and dates were among the few fruits available year-round in the northern United States before reliable refrigerated shipping, arriving pressed in boxes from Smyrna and North Africa, which is why so many recipes of the period lean on them for winter sweets.