And How To
৩ MAKE THEM fine, cinnamon and nutmeg, four eggs, one pound of figs; use the figs whole, covering them well with the cake to prevent burning. Bake in layers, frosting between each layer. Make as stiff as pound cake. Cut' with very sharp knife to prevent crumbling. This makes two loaves.
The page has been caught mid-recipe: the opening lines, with the flour, butter, sugar and liquid, are missing, and what survives begins partway through the ingredient list. Read it as a fig-filled pound cake and treat the following as notes for interpreting a fragment rather than a working formula.
- The recipe is incompleteOnly the eggs (four), the figs (one pound) and the spices are given. There is no flour, butter, sugar or leavening quantity on the page, so the batter cannot be reconstructed from this text alone without guessing.
- "Stiff as pound cake"This is the one usable structural instruction. Classic pound cake is equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, creamed to a thick batter that holds a peak on the spoon rather than pouring. Four eggs in that scheme implies roughly half a pound each of butter, sugar and flour.
- The figsAlmost certainly dried rather than fresh, though the text does not say so. Stem them and, if they have dried hard, plump them in warm water or a little sherry and blot dry, or they will pull moisture out of the crumb. "Covering them well with the cake" appears to mean burying each fig in batter so no fruit is left exposed, where the sugars would scorch.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven instruction of any kind. A batter this stiff with whole fruit suspended in it is normally baked moderately, around 325-350F in modern terms; hotter and the exterior sets long before the fig centres are hot.
- Layers or loavesThe instructions sit awkwardly together: bake in layers, frost between each layer, "this makes two loaves." "Loaf" was also used loosely of a whole cake rather than only a loaf-shaped one, so the likeliest reading is two finished cakes, each built of layers.
- SpicingCinnamon and nutmeg are given without quantity. A teaspoon of cinnamon and half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg would be a reasonable modern guess for a cake of this size. Nutmeg at this date was grated to order from the whole seed.
- CuttingThe sharp-knife note is sound and worth keeping. Whole figs in a tender crumb tear under a dull blade. A long thin knife, wiped between cuts, and a fully cooled cake will give clean slices.
Dried figs were a staple of the American winter pantry long before fresh ones were widely available, arriving in pressed cakes and boxes from Smyrna. That made fig cake, fig pudding and fig filling standbys of the holiday and special-occasion baking that fills books of this kind. The layered construction with frosting between each layer marks the recipe as belonging to the turn-of-the-century vogue for tall built-up cakes, a fashion that depended on reliable ranges and on chemical leavening being cheap and dependable. The book assumed a reader who already knew what a pound cake batter felt like, which is why so much here is left to "as stiff as pound cake" rather than spelled out.