Home › Dainty Dishes › Stuffed Figs (For this use the bag figs)
Stuffed Figs (For this use the bag figs)
For this use the bag figs which have not been pressed. Cut a small slit at the stem end of each and fill them with salted pecans or almonds. Press the opening together and roll in powdered sugar.
A three-line confection that depends entirely on the state of the figs. Everything else is assembly.
- "Bag figs"Dried figs were sold two ways: pressed flat into layered blocks or cakes, and loose in bags or boxes with their shape intact. The recipe wants the loose, plump kind because you need a cavity to fill. Whole dried Calimyrna or Turkish figs are the modern equivalent; avoid the flattened pressed blocks.
- If the figs are hardOlder stock may be too stiff to slit without splitting. Steam them over simmering water for two or three minutes, or cover with hot water for ten and pat thoroughly dry, then let them cool before filling. Damp figs will dissolve the sugar coating into syrup.
- Salted nutsThe recipe calls for salted pecans or almonds, the sort a household might well have had on hand for the table. Roasted salted nuts from a jar work; the salt plays against the sugar and the fig's own sweetness, and unsalted nuts make for a flatter result.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar; period powdered sugar clumped and was often sifted before use, and it is worth sifting now too. Roll the figs while they are barely tacky so the coating holds.
- FillingA whole pecan half or two whole almonds per fig is about right. Slitting at the stem end rather than the side keeps the fruit's shape, and pinching the opening shut leaves an almost invisible seam.
- Yield and keepingA pound of whole dried figs runs to roughly 20 to 25 pieces. They keep several days in a tin between layers of waxed paper; re-roll in sugar before serving if the coating has gone damp.
- ServingThis belongs with the sweetmeats at the end of a meal, alongside candied peel and salted nuts, or on a tray with coffee. Not a dessert course in itself.
Stuffed dried fruit sits in a long line of confections that need no cooking at all, and it appears in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks under headings of the sort often used for sweets made without heat, precisely because it could be made by hand in a parlour rather than at the range. Dried figs reached American groceries in quantity from Smyrna and, from the 1880s onward, from California's Central Valley, where growers planted Smyrna cuttings and eventually solved the pollination problem that had stalled the crop; the Californian crop only became substantial once the Blastophaga wasp was established around the turn of the century, and imported fruit remained important. The distinction the recipe draws between pressed and unpressed fruit is a shopper's distinction, not a cook's, and it tells you the writer expected readers to know their grocer's bins well enough to ask for one and not the other.