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Fig and Nut Sandwich No.2
Chop figs and English walnuts fine; moisten with whipped cream; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with smilax.
A four-line tea sandwich from the era when the filling was expected to be spread thin and the bread thinner. The only real technique is getting the fig and nut paste to bind without weeping.
- FigsDried figs, not fresh — fresh ones will not chop to a paste and will soak the bread. Snip off the hard stem ends and chop by hand or pulse briefly; a food processor run too long turns them to glue.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut of the supermarket, so named to distinguish it from the American black walnut, which is far stronger in flavour. Toast and cool them before chopping for a cleaner taste.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. About 1 cup chopped dried figs to 1/2 cup chopped walnuts, moistened with 2 to 3 tablespoons whipped cream, fills roughly eight to ten small tea sandwiches.
- Whipped cream as binderWhip to soft peaks and fold in just enough to make the mixture spreadable. Cream loosens as it sits, so assemble within an hour or two; for a filling that holds all afternoon, cream cheese thinned with a little cream is the usual modern substitute.
- The breadA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf sliced thin, buttered edge to edge to seal the surface against moisture. Trim crusts after filling, not before, and cut into fingers or triangles.
- SmilaxFlorist's smilax (Asparagus asparagoides), a common plate and table greenery of the period, laid around the dish rather than eaten. It is a decorative trim, not a food; a sprig of mint or a few grape leaves does the same job on a modern platter.
- HoldingCover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate, no more than a few hours. Beyond that the buttered bread stales at the cut edges and the cream begins to separate out of the figs.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created demand for something small, sweet and portable that was not cake. Fig and nut was one of the standard sweet pairings of the type, alongside date and nut and raisin and nut, all of them leaning on dried fruit that kept year-round in a pantry and on walnuts sold shelled by the pound. That the book offers a No. 2 at all tells you how the genre worked: the same few ingredients were recombined and renumbered, and the compiler printed more than one version. The instruction to garnish with smilax is a period signature — the trailing green vine was sold by florists for table decoration and appears in cookery writing of these years as a common way to dress a serving plate.