What are fig newtons?

National Fig Newton Day on January 16th annually recognizes a tasty pastry enjoyed across the country.

A Nabisco’s trademarked version of the fig roll, Newtons are a pastry filled with fig paste. Fig Newtons have an unusual and characteristic shape that has been adopted by many competitors, including generic fig bars.

Up until the 19th century, many physicians believed most illnesses were related to digestion problems. As a remedy, they recommended a daily intake of biscuits and fruit. Fig rolls served as an ideal solution to their advice, which remained a locally produced handmade product.

In 1891, Philadelphia baker and fig-lover Charles Roser invented and patented the machine, which inserted fig paste into a thick pastry dough. The Cambridgeport, MA-based Kennedy Biscuit Company then purchased Roser’s recipe. They began mass production after purchasing the recipe. In 1891, they produced the first Fig Newtons baked at the F.A. Kennedy Steam Bakery. The company named the pastries after the town of Newton, Massachusetts.

After recently becoming associated, the Kennedy Biscuit Company and the New York Biscuit company merged to form Nabisco. The new company trademarked the fig rolls as Fig Newtons.

Enjoy a Fig Newton, fig roll, or make your own. People of all ages enjoy this tasty bar. It comes in various flavors, but fig seems to be the most popular. Enjoy it with coffee, tea, or juice.

Use #NationalFigNewtonDay to post on social media.

National Day Calendar continues to seek the origins of this figurative food holiday. Unfortunately, while we may not figure it out, we sometimes get out of a jam. Oh well, we’ll follow the crumbs.

Q. Is a Fig Newton a cookie? A. In the U.S., the package is labeled a cookie. In the U.K., they are labeled a biscuit. But that’s less about the Fig Newton and more about language. However, some people call them fruit-filled cakes. So even though a biscuit company originally made the trademarked fig rolls, you can call them a cookie.

Q. Do Fig Newtons come in other flavors? A. Funny you should ask. In 2012, Nabisco dropped the word “Fig” from the product’s name. Since then, new flavors have hit the shelves, including strawberry, peach, and apple.

As Nabisco likes to remind us, Fig Newtons aren't just cookies: They're fruit and cake. True to that legacy, my homemade version pairs an easy, no-cook fig preserve with a soft dough inspired by yellow cake. Since everything hinges on the concentrated jammy flavor of dried figs, it's vital that you love their taste straight from the bag, so look for brands that are plump, moist, and naturally sweet. I dig Trader Joe's, having found other national brands disappointingly bland.

Along with homemade Oreos, DIY Fig Newtons were among the first recipes I ever tackled on Serious Eats. But that was some years ago, and I've learned a lot about recipe development since then. Namely, how to make a dough that's a lot easier to handle outside of a professional kitchen. Now I'm back with the recipe for homemade Fig Newtons from my cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts at Amazon.

Like the original, these homemade Newtons aren't cookies—they're fruit and cake. To capture Fig Newtons’ unique texture, the batter is made with butter, sugar, orange zest, cinnamon, and honey, creamed until light and fluffy, then blended with a squeeze of orange juice and a few egg yolks. It's a curious combination of ingredients, but one that makes for a cookie that's soft and cakey, with a warm yellow hue.

The yolks help it taste like "yellow cake," while the subtle use of honey, cinnamon, and orange make for a freakishly accurate match in the flavor department (even if those aren't necessarily the flavors that come to mind when thinking about Fig Newtons; have faith).

Those ingredients also make the dough very soft, so after adding the flour it should be gathered up in a ball, wrapped in plastic, and refrigerated until firm and cool.

The exact amount of time will vary depending on the thickness of the dough, but expect about an hour. It can also be refrigerated up to a week in advance if you'd like to split the project up into a few bite-sized chunks.

Whether the dough is refrigerated for an hour or a day, that leaves plenty of downtime to make the dried fig filling. That's right, dried figs. Since the bulk of their water content has already been removed, dried figs have a flavor and sweetness that is much more concentrated than fresh figs, yet they taste surprisingly fresh in the filling because they haven't been cooked before. To achieve a similar intensity with fresh figs, you'd need to cook the fruit into a jam with sugar, a process that changes their flavor and consistency and makes the filling more inclined to ooze or bubble out of the cake.

With dried figs, however, you don't need any additional sugar or cooking. Just trim off their stems, cut them in half, and purée with a touch of orange juice and applesauce to give the "jam" a smooth, pipe-able consistency. (In the fall, you can replace the applesauce with an equal weight of fresh figs to achieve the same thing, but I wanted my basic recipe to be feasible year-round.)

For the most Fig Newton-y flavor, grab dried Mission figs; other types of figs won't have the right flavor profile or sweetness. Also make sure the dried Mission figs are flavorful and plump; bland or withered up fruit won't do these cookies any favors. Your mileage may vary, but I've been really happy with the packaged figs at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.

If your dried Mission figs are flavorful but a little too crusty or dry, the consistency of the "jam" may need to be adjusted by processing it with an extra quarter-ounce of water or so. In the end, the mixture should be much thicker than a traditional jam, with an almost dough-like consistency. Like the cookie dough itself, the fig filling can be made and refrigerated several days in advance, then brought back to about 70°F (21°C) for use.

When you're ready to assemble the cookies, transfer the fig jam to a large pastry bag fitted with a half-inch round tip.

Place the chilled dough on an unfloured surface and knead briefly until it feels cold and firm but pliable, then generously dust the workspace and dough with additional flour.

Seriously, don't be shy here. The dough is soft and a little sticky, so using plenty of flour will make the rolling a lot easier. Excess flour can be brushed away in the end, but you can’t undo a sticky mess*.

*With this or any other recipe for a rolled dough, it will always be necessary to take special precautions if it's above 75°F (24°C) in your kitchen; for more information, check out these tips for keeping dough cool.

Roll the dough as evenly as you can to create a square-ish shape; once it's about eight inches across, dust it with a bit more flour then flip it over, dust again, and keep rolling until it's about 15 inches square. I find this easiest to do with a French pin, but as with any pastry project, the most important thing is to work with equipment that feels comfortable in your hands.

It's important to use a ruler for this step. The dough doesn't have to be a truly perfect square, but it does need to be approximately 15 inches square; an extra quarter inch one way or the other isn't a big deal, but if the whole thing's a full inch too big or too small, the cookies will turn out too thick or too thin.

Not only will that throw off the ratio of "fruit and cake," but significant deviation from the proper size will change how the cookies bake, potentially leading to cookies that are either doughy or dry. So do take the time to check the dimensions of the dough as you roll, and don't try to wing it! As long as you use a ruler to keep yourself in line, you won't have any trouble.

Once you've established a roughly 15-inch square, slide an offset spatula under the dough to ensure it hasn't stuck somewhere along the way. Dust off the excess flour with a pastry brush, and trim the dough into four three-and-a-quarter-inch strips.

To fill the cookies, position the pastry tip just above the dough, about one-eighth-inch from its surface, then apply firm pressure to begin piping, and move slowly down the length of a prepared strip. The placement and speed will force the filling to spread and flatten; if the piping tip is held too high or moved too fast, the filling will come out as a narrow cylinder, instead.

Pipe the filling down the middle of each strip of dough. If needed, you can redistribute some filling if you happen to misjudge the piping speed or the amount of pressure needed to apply it evenly and run out before the end. With damp fingertips, the filling can be molded and portioned with relative ease, then flattened back into shape.

Next, fold the dough over the filling on one side. If needed, dust off any excess flour, then roll the whole thing over like a log, so that the seam runs along the bottom. Brush off the floury tops, then use your hands to smooth the fig bars into a flat, even shape. With both hands, carefully transfer the fig bars to a parchment-lined half sheet pan.

When I say parchment, I really mean it; the slippery surface of a silicone baking mat will allow the cookies to spread more than they should (as a general rule, I don't recommend baking cookies on silicone, but that's a rant for another day).

Bake the fig bars at 350°F (180°C) until they're puffed, firm, and very pale gold, without any significant browning around the edges. Immediately cut the warm bars into 1-inch pieces with a bench knife.

Technically you can cut the bars with whatever you like, but it can be hard to maneuver a chef's knife in a sheet pan, and the bench knife is great for scooping up several homemade Fig Newtons at once.

Transfer the warm cookies to an airtight container with a paper towel placed along the bottom and between each layer.

Once the container's all filled up, top it with another paper towel (to catch condensation from the lid), and close it up. This unusual set-up lets the warm cookies steam themselves to soften and retain moisture, while improving their cakiness as well. Freshly baked, the homemade Fig Newtons may seem a little dry, but after cooling in a steamy environment they taste absolutely perfect.

In the end, these cookies come together with a flavor remarkably like the original, with a freshness that can't be beat. They're tender, soft, and cakey, with a gentle hint of cinnamon and orange to play up the concentrated fruitiness of dried Mission figs.

You can find variations on this recipe (including Apricot Strawberry, Blueberry Lime, Cherry Banana, and even "Pig" Newtons made with bacon) in my cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts at Amazon.

At the same time, and arguably because of the lowly Fig Newton, the legendary Nabisco baking company had its roots. Its bakery in Chicago today is the largest bakery in the world, with more than 1,200 workers and producing 320 pounds of snack foods annually.

The recipe for the fig filling was the brainchild of Charles M. Roser, a cookie maker born in Ohio. Roser worked for a bakery in Philadelphia who sold his recipe to the Kennedy Biscuit company. Although rumor has it the cookie was named after the pioneering physicist Isaac Newton, in fact, Kennedy Biscuit named the cookie Newton after the town in Massachusetts. The Boston-based company had a habit of naming their cookies after local towns, and they already had cookies named Beacon Hill, Harvard, and Shrewsbury when the Newton was created.

Roser probably based his recipe on fig rolls, up until then a locally and homemade cookie brought to the U.S. by British immigrants. The cookie is made up of a crumbly pastry with a jammy scoop of fig in the middle. Nabisco's recipes are (obviously) a secret, but modern copies suggest that you start with dried mission figs, and add applesauce and orange juice, and a little orange zest as you process the fruit. More exotic recipes add Medjool dates, currants and crystallized ginger and perhaps a few ground almonds.

The manufacture of Fig Newtons was made possible by the creation of Florida inventor James Henry Mitchell, who revolutionized the packaged cookie business by building an apparatus that could make a hollow cookie crust and fill it with fruit preserves. His machine worked like funnel within a funnel; the inside funnel supplied jam, while the outside funnel pumped out the dough. This produced an endless length of filled cookie, which could then be cut into smaller pieces.

Mitchell also developed a dough-sheeting machine, another that made sugar wafers, and others that helped speed cake production: all of these went into production by the precursors of Nabisco.

At the end of the 19th century, bakeries began to merge, in order to mass produce cookies for a burgeoning middle-class market. In 1889, William Moore of New York bought out eight bakeries to start the New York Biscuit Company (including Kennedy Biscuit), and in 1890, Chicago-based Adolphus Green began the American Biscuit Company, by merging 40 midwestern bakeries.

It was a match made in heaven: Moore and Green merged in 1898, making the National Biscuit Company, or N.B.C. Among the purchases were the machines of Mitchell and Roser's cookie recipe. Mitchell's machine for sugar wafers was also purchased; N.B.C. started mass producing sugar wafers in 1901. Both Mitchell and Roser walked away wealthy.

In 1898, N.B.C. had 114 bakeries and a capital of US $55 million. They built an enormous bakery in downtown New York, what is today the Chelsea Market, and continued to expand it. The chief architect of this project was Adolphus Green, and he insisted on standard recipes for N.B.C.'s products. They continued to make two wildly successful products that the little bakery companies had made: Fig Newtons (they added the Fig to the name when the cookie received good reviews), and Premium Saltines.

A new cookie called Uneeda Biscuit was introduced in 1898—and despite the goofy name N.B.C. even had a copyright infringement case over competitors who called their biscuits Uwanta and Ulika. In 1903, N.B.C. introduced Barnum's Animal Crackers in the famous decorative box resembling a circus cage filled with animals; and in 1912, they introduced both Lorna Doone shortbread cookies and the unstoppable Oreos.

Nabisco began replacing the fig jam in its cookie with raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries, as well as an apple cinnamon flavor by the 1980s. In 2012, they once again dropped the "Fig" from the name because, as the Kraft specialist Gary Osifchin told The New York Times, they wanted to change the core of the brand to fruit. "It was going to be hard for us to advance the Newtons brand with the baggage of the fig."

Adams, Cecil. Who or what are Fig Newton cookies named after? The Straight Dope May 8, 1998.

Klara, Robert. Kicking the Figs out of Fig Newtons. Adweek June 18, 2014

Nabisco Foods Group History. Funding Universe. International Directory of Company Histories, Vol. 7. St. James Press, 1993.

Newman, Andrew Adam. Reminders That a Cookie Goes Beyond the Fig. The New York Times, April 30, 2012.

As Nabisco likes to remind us, Fig Newtons aren't just cookies: They're fruit and cake. True to that legacy, my homemade version pairs an easy, no-cook fig preserve with a soft dough inspired by yellow cake. Since everything hinges on the concentrated jammy flavor of dried figs, it's vital that you love their taste straight from the bag, so look for brands that are plump, moist, and naturally sweet. I dig Trader Joe's, having found other national brands disappointingly bland.

Along with homemade Oreos, DIY Fig Newtons were among the first recipes I ever tackled on Serious Eats. But that was some years ago, and I've learned a lot about recipe development since then. Namely, how to make a dough that's a lot easier to handle outside of a professional kitchen. Now I'm back with the recipe for homemade Fig Newtons from my cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts at Amazon.

Like the original, these homemade Newtons aren't cookies—they're fruit and cake. To capture Fig Newtons’ unique texture, the batter is made with butter, sugar, orange zest, cinnamon, and honey, creamed until light and fluffy, then blended with a squeeze of orange juice and a few egg yolks. It's a curious combination of ingredients, but one that makes for a cookie that's soft and cakey, with a warm yellow hue.

The yolks help it taste like "yellow cake," while the subtle use of honey, cinnamon, and orange make for a freakishly accurate match in the flavor department (even if those aren't necessarily the flavors that come to mind when thinking about Fig Newtons; have faith).

Those ingredients also make the dough very soft, so after adding the flour it should be gathered up in a ball, wrapped in plastic, and refrigerated until firm and cool.

The exact amount of time will vary depending on the thickness of the dough, but expect about an hour. It can also be refrigerated up to a week in advance if you'd like to split the project up into a few bite-sized chunks.

Whether the dough is refrigerated for an hour or a day, that leaves plenty of downtime to make the dried fig filling. That's right, dried figs. Since the bulk of their water content has already been removed, dried figs have a flavor and sweetness that is much more concentrated than fresh figs, yet they taste surprisingly fresh in the filling because they haven't been cooked before. To achieve a similar intensity with fresh figs, you'd need to cook the fruit into a jam with sugar, a process that changes their flavor and consistency and makes the filling more inclined to ooze or bubble out of the cake.

With dried figs, however, you don't need any additional sugar or cooking. Just trim off their stems, cut them in half, and purée with a touch of orange juice and applesauce to give the "jam" a smooth, pipe-able consistency. (In the fall, you can replace the applesauce with an equal weight of fresh figs to achieve the same thing, but I wanted my basic recipe to be feasible year-round.)

For the most Fig Newton-y flavor, grab dried Mission figs; other types of figs won't have the right flavor profile or sweetness. Also make sure the dried Mission figs are flavorful and plump; bland or withered up fruit won't do these cookies any favors. Your mileage may vary, but I've been really happy with the packaged figs at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.

If your dried Mission figs are flavorful but a little too crusty or dry, the consistency of the "jam" may need to be adjusted by processing it with an extra quarter-ounce of water or so. In the end, the mixture should be much thicker than a traditional jam, with an almost dough-like consistency. Like the cookie dough itself, the fig filling can be made and refrigerated several days in advance, then brought back to about 70°F (21°C) for use.

When you're ready to assemble the cookies, transfer the fig jam to a large pastry bag fitted with a half-inch round tip.

Place the chilled dough on an unfloured surface and knead briefly until it feels cold and firm but pliable, then generously dust the workspace and dough with additional flour.

Seriously, don't be shy here. The dough is soft and a little sticky, so using plenty of flour will make the rolling a lot easier. Excess flour can be brushed away in the end, but you can’t undo a sticky mess*.

*With this or any other recipe for a rolled dough, it will always be necessary to take special precautions if it's above 75°F (24°C) in your kitchen; for more information, check out these tips for keeping dough cool.

Roll the dough as evenly as you can to create a square-ish shape; once it's about eight inches across, dust it with a bit more flour then flip it over, dust again, and keep rolling until it's about 15 inches square. I find this easiest to do with a French pin, but as with any pastry project, the most important thing is to work with equipment that feels comfortable in your hands.

It's important to use a ruler for this step. The dough doesn't have to be a truly perfect square, but it does need to be approximately 15 inches square; an extra quarter inch one way or the other isn't a big deal, but if the whole thing's a full inch too big or too small, the cookies will turn out too thick or too thin.

Not only will that throw off the ratio of "fruit and cake," but significant deviation from the proper size will change how the cookies bake, potentially leading to cookies that are either doughy or dry. So do take the time to check the dimensions of the dough as you roll, and don't try to wing it! As long as you use a ruler to keep yourself in line, you won't have any trouble.

Once you've established a roughly 15-inch square, slide an offset spatula under the dough to ensure it hasn't stuck somewhere along the way. Dust off the excess flour with a pastry brush, and trim the dough into four three-and-a-quarter-inch strips.

To fill the cookies, position the pastry tip just above the dough, about one-eighth-inch from its surface, then apply firm pressure to begin piping, and move slowly down the length of a prepared strip. The placement and speed will force the filling to spread and flatten; if the piping tip is held too high or moved too fast, the filling will come out as a narrow cylinder, instead.

Pipe the filling down the middle of each strip of dough. If needed, you can redistribute some filling if you happen to misjudge the piping speed or the amount of pressure needed to apply it evenly and run out before the end. With damp fingertips, the filling can be molded and portioned with relative ease, then flattened back into shape.

Next, fold the dough over the filling on one side. If needed, dust off any excess flour, then roll the whole thing over like a log, so that the seam runs along the bottom. Brush off the floury tops, then use your hands to smooth the fig bars into a flat, even shape. With both hands, carefully transfer the fig bars to a parchment-lined half sheet pan.

When I say parchment, I really mean it; the slippery surface of a silicone baking mat will allow the cookies to spread more than they should (as a general rule, I don't recommend baking cookies on silicone, but that's a rant for another day).

Bake the fig bars at 350°F (180°C) until they're puffed, firm, and very pale gold, without any significant browning around the edges. Immediately cut the warm bars into 1-inch pieces with a bench knife.

Technically you can cut the bars with whatever you like, but it can be hard to maneuver a chef's knife in a sheet pan, and the bench knife is great for scooping up several homemade Fig Newtons at once.

Transfer the warm cookies to an airtight container with a paper towel placed along the bottom and between each layer.

Once the container's all filled up, top it with another paper towel (to catch condensation from the lid), and close it up. This unusual set-up lets the warm cookies steam themselves to soften and retain moisture, while improving their cakiness as well. Freshly baked, the homemade Fig Newtons may seem a little dry, but after cooling in a steamy environment they taste absolutely perfect.

In the end, these cookies come together with a flavor remarkably like the original, with a freshness that can't be beat. They're tender, soft, and cakey, with a gentle hint of cinnamon and orange to play up the concentrated fruitiness of dried Mission figs.

You can find variations on this recipe (including Apricot Strawberry, Blueberry Lime, Cherry Banana, and even "Pig" Newtons made with bacon) in my cookbook, BraveTart: Iconic American Desserts at Amazon.