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Fig Sandwiches
Cut or chop fine one cupful of figs; add one-half of a cup of hot water and cook to a paste; add one teaspoonful of lemon juice and set away until cold. Spread on the prepared bread, dust with finely chopped nuts and put together.
A simple fig paste spread, of the kind that filled afternoon tea and lunch-box sandwiches around 1900. The only real technique is cooking the figs down far enough that the filling does not soak the bread.
- The hinge: cook it dry enoughSimmer the chopped figs with the water until the mixture holds its shape on a spoon and no free liquid runs out; this takes only a few minutes over low heat. A loose paste will wet the crumb and the sandwiches will not hold up.
- Which figsDried figs are meant. Stem them before chopping, and add a little more water than the half cup if the pan goes dry before they break down.
- "Prepared bread"Period sandwich chapters generally mean a fine-grained white loaf, trimmed of crust and cut thin, sometimes buttered on the cut side. Butter helps seal the crumb against the moist filling.
- NutsWalnuts, almonds or pecans, chopped fine and ideally toasted and cooled. Dust them over the paste while it is still tacky so they hold; loose nuts fall out when the sandwich is cut.
- Lemon juiceOne teaspoon in a cup of figs is for brightness, not preservation. It keeps a very sweet paste from tasting flat.
- Make aheadThe paste keeps a week covered in the refrigerator and spreads better after a brief return to room temperature. Assemble the sandwiches the same day they are served.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup of filling, enough for roughly eight to ten thin tea sandwiches cut into fingers or triangles.
Fig sandwiches belong to the wave of sweet and fruit fillings that entered American cookbooks once the sandwich stopped being strictly a meat item. By the 1890s dried figs were arriving from Smyrna and, increasingly, from California's Fresno district, and household writers recommended them as a wholesome sweet that could stand in for cake at teas, church socials and picnics. Similar cooked fig fillings appear in period cookbooks for layer cakes and for fig bars. Sandwich sections of this era also suggest how far the closed, thin-cut, crustless tea sandwich had become a fixed form: the recipe assumes the bread is already "prepared" and says nothing more about it.