Olivia Potts

Fig rolls: this classic biscuit is better home-made

  • From Spectator Life

I don’t often find myself longing for the industrial rigours of a factory when I’m baking in my kitchen at home. But as I patted the squiggle of fig paste with wet hands, corralling it into a rough sausage shape I thought ruefully of Charles Roser of Philadelphia and his patent for a fig roll machine.

In the late nineteenth century, poor digestion was thought to be the cause of a number of wider ailments and, as with breakfast cereal, biscuits were seen as an aid to digestion – and figs, of course, were a particularly digestion-friendly fruit. Brought over from Britain to America, the fig roll tended to be made by hand in small batches. That is, until 1891, when Roser came up with a machine which could pipe the fig paste directly into the cakey biscuit dough, a sort of sweet extrusion process. The Massachusetts Kennedy factory bought Roser’s recipe and method, and began commercial production of the biscuit, calling it the fig newton, after the nearby town of Newton.

No such luck for me (or, I imagine, you) in my fig roll making endeavours. My fig rolls are very much hand-made, but no poorer for that. To my mind, whether you call it a fig roll or a fig newton, it’s more of a cake than a biscuit: the dough is very soft, almost damp, buttery and tender. Dried figs are cooked with a little water and muscovado sugar, until the fruit bubbles and starts to break down. A quick whizz in a food processor with a ball of stem ginger creates a simple fig jam that will firm up a little as it cools, and then can be manipulated with damp hands and rolled into that cakey, sweet dough. The jam shouldn’t be bland in texture or taste, but sticky sweet, dark and caramelly from the fruit and muscovado, and popping with little fig seeds.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Olivia Potts
Written by
Olivia Potts
Olivia Potts is a former criminal barrister who retrained as a pastry chef. She co-hosts The Spectator’s Table Talk podcast and writes Spectator Life's The Vintage Chef column. A chef and food writer, she was winner of the Fortnum and Mason's debut food book award in 2020 for her memoir A Half Baked Idea.

Topics in this article

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in