Home › Cake Fillings and Frostings › Fig Filling
Fig Filling
Mix one-half pound of figs chopped fine, one cup of sugar and one cup of water and boil in a double kettle until smooth and thick; then one teaspoon of vanilla. Boil the figs in water until tender before adding the sugar.
A straightforward fruit paste for layer cakes, with one bit of muddled sequencing in the original that is worth sorting out before you start.
- Read the last sentence firstThe instructions are given out of order: simmer the chopped figs in the water until they are soft, and only then stir in the sugar and continue cooking. Fruit simmered in sugar syrup from the start tends to soften more slowly, which is presumably why the recipe adds the correction.
- "Double kettle"A double boiler — a bowl or pan set over simmering water. It exists here to stop the sugar scorching, but a heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works and is much faster; stir often and watch the last few minutes.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of figs is about 225 g, roughly 1½ cups chopped. One cup of sugar to one cup of water is a heavy syrup by modern taste; three-quarters of a cup of sugar still sets the filling and lets the fruit read as fruit.
- Which figsThe instruction to boil the figs until tender points to dried rather than fresh. Use any dried fig; trim the hard stem tips, which never soften. Fresh figs carry far more water and will not thicken to the same paste.
- How thick is thickCook until a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that closes only slowly — around 15 to 25 minutes total, depending on the pan. It should mound on the spoon when cool, since it firms further as it chills.
- Vanilla goes in off the heatThe recipe adds the vanilla last; take the pan off the burner first, as the aroma is volatile and will carry better.
- YieldEnough to fill a two- or three-layer 8- or 9-inch cake. Spread it cool, not warm, or it will slide out from between the layers.
Fig fillings ran through American cake and cookie recipes from the 1880s onward, and their popularity tracked the arrival of cheap dried figs — Smyrna figs shipped from Turkey, and later California-grown fruit, though commercial California Smyrna (Calimyrna) production waited on the successful establishment of the caprifying wasp around the turn of the century. Readers would have recognized sweetened fig paste as a thrifty pantry option: no cream, no fresh fruit, no ice needed. Cake filling chapters of this period lean heavily on such boiled fruit pastes, which kept well in a household without reliable refrigeration.