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Favorite Sandwich
Chop stewed figs, add a dash of lemon juice, spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, and cover with another slice. Garnish with a spray of smilax.
A tea sandwich of the plainest kind, which means the figs have to carry it. The stewing is the whole job.
- Stewed figsMost likely dried figs simmered until soft rather than canned or fresh fruit, though the book does not say which. Cover about 8 oz of dried figs with water, simmer 20-30 minutes until they yield easily to a spoon, then drain well before chopping. Fresh figs collapse into a wet purée and will soak the bread.
- Drain hardThe hinge of the recipe. Any syrup left clinging turns the crumb grey and soggy within minutes, so press the chopped figs in a sieve until they stop dripping. A stiff, jam-like paste is what you want.
- A dash of lemon juiceRead this as a teaspoon or so per cup of chopped figs. Dried figs stewed plain are cloying and flat; the acid is doing the work of seasoning, so taste and add more if it still reads as sugary.
- Lightly butteredThe butter is a moisture barrier, not a flavour. Have it genuinely soft and spread it thin and edge to edge, including the corners, or the fig paste will find the bare crumb.
- Thin slices of white breadTea sandwiches of the period were generally made on a close-crumbed white loaf, sliced thin, something on the order of 1/4 inch. Sandwich bread from a bag is close enough; a rustic open-crumbed loaf tears under the paste. Trim crusts and cut into fingers or triangles after assembling.
- The smilax garnishFlorist's smilax (usually Asparagus asparagoides) was a standard trailing green on Edwardian platters. It is decoration, not food, and its berries are toxic, so if you use it keep it on the plate and away from the sandwich, or substitute a mint sprig you can actually eat.
- Yield and holding8 oz of dried figs, stewed, fills roughly eight to ten sandwiches, or thirty-odd small tea fingers. The filling keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator; assemble within an hour or two of serving and keep the tray under a damp cloth.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) appeared at the height of the American sandwich craze, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon demanded dozens of small, crustless, faintly sweet things and cookbook writers obliged with hundreds of near-identical variations. Sweet sandwiches like this one belonged to that world rather than to the lunch pail: bread as a vehicle for fruit paste, cut small and stacked on a doily. Dried figs made the filling practical, since they shipped and stored indefinitely and only needed water and a little heat to become spreadable, and Smyrna and later California figs were widely sold in pressed cakes and boxes by this date. The direction to finish with a spray of smilax is the period's signature: the trailing florist's green was so ubiquitous on turn-of-the-century tables that recipe writers named it as casually as we would name parsley, and it says more about how the plate was meant to look than about how the sandwich tasted.