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Fig and Nut Sandwich
Cut rounds of bread with a biscuit cutter and lightly butter. For each sandwich use two dried figs, fill the figs with the English walnut meats chopped; roll the figs in powdered sugar and place between the rounds of bread.
A tea-table sandwich from the era when the sandwich course was expected at afternoon receptions. The written method leaves the filling in whole-fig form, which makes for awkward eating; a little adjustment in assembly is the difference between a neat round and a collapsing one.
- The hinge: flatten the figsTwo whole stuffed figs between two thin rounds of bread will not compress into anything you can bite. Split each fig, press it flat, and use the halves as a layer, or chop figs and nuts together into a paste. The original may have in mind softer, stickier dried figs than much of what is sold today, though it says nothing on the point.
- Soften the fruit firstDried figs sold today are often firm and dry at the stem end. Steep them in hot water or orange juice for ten minutes and pat dry before filling; trim off the hard stem tips.
- "English walnut"Simply the common walnut, Juglans regia, named in older American books to distinguish it from the native black walnut, which is stronger and more resinous. Ordinary shelled walnuts are what is meant. Toasting them briefly improves the flavor and is no betrayal of the recipe.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period the term generally means a finely ground sugar; modern confectioners' sugar is the nearest equivalent. Roll the figs in it at the last moment: moisture in the fruit dissolves the coating, and the cornstarch in modern confectioners' sugar can go pasty.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, is what a cutter of this kind handles best. Cut the rounds from bread a day old; fresh bread tears and compresses under the cutter. A cutter of about 2 inches gives a tea-sandwich scale, though the recipe names neither thickness nor diameter.
- ButterSoft, not melted, spread edge to edge. Beyond flavor it helps seal the crumb against the fig's moisture.
- Yield and keepingA standard loaf gives roughly 20 to 24 rounds, or 10 to 12 sandwiches. Assemble within an hour or two of serving and hold under a damp cloth; these do not improve overnight.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) collected some four hundred fillings at the height of the American sandwich craze, when the item had moved from the workman's dinner pail to the ladies' luncheon and the afternoon reception. The sweet chapter is the clearest sign of that shift: sandwiches made with fruit, nuts and powdered sugar were served as a light final course, closer in spirit to a petit four than to a meal. Dried figs and walnuts appear often in such books; both were pantry staples, and both arrived from the Mediterranean trade in quantity by the 1900s, with California fig and walnut orchards then coming into serious production. The biscuit cutter turns up in these recipes too: uniform little rounds, crusts gone, marked out a sandwich as company food rather than something merely cut from a loaf.