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Fig Sandwich No. 3
Stew figs and chop; season with a little wine and place between lightly buttered slices of white or graham bread.
A two-line filling that assumes you know what stewed figs should look like. The whole thing hinges on cooking the figs down far enough that the paste holds together between bread.
- Which figs"Stew" points to dried figs, the usual pantry form, though the book does not say so. Calimyrna or Black Mission both work; trim the hard stem nubs before stewing or you will find them in the sandwich.
- StewingCover the figs with water and simmer 20-30 minutes until they are plump and a knife goes through the skin without resistance, then drain well and chop. Fresh figs need no more than 10 minutes and give a much looser, wetter filling.
- Get it thickA watery fig mixture soaks the bread through within minutes. Return the chopped fruit to the pan and cook it down until it mounds on a spoon and no liquid pools when you draw a line through it.
- "A little wine"Unspecified, but a tablespoon or two per cup of chopped figs is the right scale. Sherry, Madeira or port suit the sweetness; adding it to the hot fruit drives off some of the alcohol while keeping the flavour.
- Graham breadPeriod graham bread was made from coarse unsifted wheat flour, closer to a plain wholemeal loaf than to anything sweet. A whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the nearest thing on a shelf today.
- Why butter the breadThe thin film of butter acts largely as a moisture barrier. Spread it right to the edges and the sandwich holds up better.
- YieldRoughly a cup of filling from 8 oz of dried figs, enough for four to six sandwiches cut into fingers or triangles.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States between about 1900 and 1920, when afternoon tea, ladies' luncheons and the packed lunch box all created demand for small filled breads, and publishers answered with collections that ran to dozens of numbered variations on a single ingredient. Dried figs were a natural candidate: cheap, shelf-stable, imported in quantity from Smyrna and increasingly grown in California, and sweet enough to need no sugar added. The graham bread offered as an alternative here points to the lingering influence of Sylvester Graham's campaign of the 1830s and 1840s for coarse unsifted wheat flour, which by 1900 had settled into ordinary commercial baking as a wholesome-sounding option rather than a reform diet. The splash of wine suggests, though it does not prove, that these genteel tea-table books were written before Prohibition.