Fig and Roll
Split twelve figs, scrape out the soft portion and rub this to a paste; butter thin slices of fresh white or brown bread, remove the crust, spread on the fig paste and roll the bread carefully; press for a moment, then roll it in a piece of tissue paper, pressing the ends as you would an old-fashioned motto, or it may be tied with baby ribbon of any color.
A rolled tea sandwich rather than a stacked one, and the success of it is entirely in the bread: it has to be fresh and cut thin enough to bend without cracking.
- The figsAlmost certainly dried figs rather than fresh, though the recipe does not say so: scraping out the interior and leaving the tough skin behind only makes sense with a dried fig, and a fresh one would give you juice rather than paste.
- Making the paste"Rub this to a paste" most likely means working the scraped pulp through a sieve or against a bowl with the back of a spoon. A small food processor does it in seconds, and a spoonful of hot water, orange juice or sherry will bring a stiff paste to spreadable.
- Bread thicknessCut thin from an unsliced sandwich loaf -- the recipe wants it fresh -- or use the thinnest commercial sliced bread. Roll each slice lightly with a rolling pin first: compressed crumb bends around the filling instead of splitting along the top.
- Butter mattersThe butter is structural as well as flavouring. Softened to spreadable and taken right to the edges, it seals the crumb against the moisture in the fig so the roll does not go soggy before it reaches the table.
- Holding the shapePress the finished rolls seam down under a light board or tray for a few minutes, or chill them briefly wrapped in a damp cloth. Both do the job the original's momentary press is aiming at.
- "An old-fashioned motto"A motto was a paper-wrapped party favour or sweet with twisted ends, of a kind closely bound up with the development of the Christmas cracker. Twist the tissue at each end so the roll sits in the middle like a sweet in its wrapper.
- Yield and timingTwelve figs will fill roughly a dozen slices, giving twelve rolls or twenty-four if you halve them crosswise. Assemble the same day; they are at their best within a few hours.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection belongs to the brief American vogue, roughly the 1890s through the 1910s, for the sandwich as a dainty rather than a meal, served at afternoon teas, card parties and church socials where a plate of small identical things mattered more than substance. Dried figs were a natural filling: California's fig industry was expanding fast in this period and imported Smyrna figs are often said to have been a fixture of the winter store cupboard, sweet, keepable and needing no cooking. The tissue-paper wrapping is the giveaway that this is party food rather than lunch, borrowing the twisted-end trick from the paper mottoes and bonbons that decorated Victorian and Edwardian tables. Books of this kind are generally described as dividing their contents into savoury and sweet, and the sweet sandwich, now nearly extinct outside the peanut butter jar, was then a perfectly ordinary thing to hand round with tea.