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Fig Cake
Beat one cupful sugar and one-half cupful butter to a cream, add to this a small cupful of milk, beat again, two cupfuls of flour, two level teaspoonfuls of baking powder, vanilla, whites of three eggs, beaten. Bake in two layers. Filling-One-half pound of figs chopped fine, boil in a very little water, one cupful of light brown sugar, three tablespoonfuls of water, a little pat of butter, boil until it will hair from a spoon. Stir figs into this mixture, beat until cool.
A plain white layer cake with a boiled fig filling, written in the shorthand of a period when every cook knew what "hair from a spoon" meant. Two points carry the recipe: the sugar syrup and the folding of the whites.
- "Boil until it will hair from a spoon"This is the thread stage, roughly 230-235F on a candy thermometer, when a lifted spoon trails a fine thread rather than dropping in beads. Take it further and the filling sets hard between the layers; stop short and it runs out the sides.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Two thin layers of a creamed butter cake want 350F, 20 to 25 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Pan sizeTwo cupfuls of flour makes two 8-inch layers comfortably, or two 9-inch layers that will be shallow. Grease and flour, or line with parchment.
- Order of mixingAs written the milk goes in before the flour, which will look curdled. It comes together once the flour is added; alternating the milk and flour in two or three additions gives a smoother batter and the same result.
- The egg whites"Beaten" here means whipped to soft peaks and folded in last, as the order of the recipe implies. The whiteness of the crumb comes from using the whites only rather than whole eggs. Beating them into the batter with a mixer defeats the point. The three yolks are left over; they keep a day or two, covered, in the refrigerator.
- VanillaNo quantity is given, as was usual. A teaspoon is right for this size of cake.
- The figsHalf a pound of dried figs, stems removed, chopped fine. Simmer them in just enough water to keep them from catching until soft, then drain before stirring into the syrup, or the filling will be loose.
- Beating until coolThis is what turns the syrup opaque and spreadable, the same principle as fudge. Spread it while it is still slightly warm; once fully cold it stiffens and tears the crumb.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, ten to twelve slices. The recipe provides filling only, for between the layers, and says nothing about finishing the top.
Fig cakes and fig fillings turn up throughout American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, in the same company as date and raisin fillings, because dried figs travelled and stored well and were among the cheaper sweet fruits available inland year-round. Many are said to have arrived pressed into boxes or strung in rings from Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, and later from California, whose fig plantings expanded considerably in this period. The cake itself is a straightforward creamed white layer cake, a form whose spread is generally linked to the availability of reliable commercial baking powders, established from the late 1850s and 1860s; earlier books would have leavened the same batter with saleratus and sour milk.