Fig rolls: this classic biscuit is better home-made

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.