You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. But you can’t deny their popularity. Fig Newtons have remained a much-loved pastry for over a century, so no wonder they get their own day. January 16 is National Fig Newton Day and we know you can’t wait to enjoy a few in celebration.
The Evolution of the Newton
The iconic Fig Newton was one of the earliest commercially baked products in America, and the serendipitous result of the blending of a cookie maker in Philadelphia, an inventor from Florida, and a massive merger of over 100 bakeries in New York and Chicago.
The recipe for the fig filling was the brainchild of Charles M. Roser, a cookie maker born in Ohio who worked for the Kennedy Biscuit company. Roser probably based his recipe on fig rolls, up until then a locally and homemade cookie brought to the U.S. by British immigrants. In the 19th century, physicians began to promote an increase in biscuits and fruit in one’s diet as a remedy for digestive problems. Fig rolls became a popular food item as a result. The cookie is made up of a crumbly pastry with a jammy scoop of fig in the middle.
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.
The manufacture of Fig Newtons was made possible by the creation of Florida inventor James Henry Mitchell, who in 1891, 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.
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., which was later changed to Nabisco.
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.”
But if you’re a fan of the classic, go on and get figgy with it. It’s Fig Newton Day!
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