Fig Newton Day

What the day is

Fig Newton Day is observed on January 16. The cookie is a soft cake-like pastry wrapped around fig paste, sold in the United States since the late nineteenth century and familiar enough that most people have an opinion about it.

The name causes constant confusion. It has nothing to do with Isaac Newton. The Massachusetts bakery that produced the cookies named several products after towns near Boston, and Newton is one of them.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented. The cookie's own origin is tied to a machine. In the late 1800s a device was developed that could extrude two streams at once, a dough tube with fruit paste inside it, producing a continuous filled rope that was then cut into bars. That mechanism is what made the product commercially viable, and the cookie was produced from 1891 by a Massachusetts bakery that later became part of Nabisco.

The fig filling suited the era's ideas about digestion. Fig pastries were promoted as wholesome at a time when fruit-and-biscuit combinations were sold partly on health grounds, a positioning the brand kept for a long time afterward.

The product has changed names since. The manufacturer dropped Fig from the branding in the 2010s, marketing the range simply as Newtons with several fruit fillings, which irritated the people who had been eating them for decades and did nothing to dislodge the original name in ordinary speech.

How to take part

• Eat one and decide where you stand. This is a cookie people are unusually definite about.
• Try the homemade version. Fig paste wrapped in a soft dough is straightforward, and fresh ones are markedly better than the packet.
• Use real dried figs. Soaking and blending them with a little orange juice and zest gives a filling with actual fruit flavor.
• Try a different filling if figs are not for you. Date, apricot and prune all work in the same format.
• Eat them with strong coffee or tea. The cookie is sweet and slightly dense, and needs something to cut it.