It was a match made in heaven in 1891 when Charles M. Roser took some soft dough, filled it with fig jam, and made the Fig Newton. This cookie is one of the earliest commercially baked products in America and today is the third most popular cookie on the market.
Roser worked for a bakery in Philadelphia which later sold his recipe to the Boston-based Kennedy Biscuit Company. There the cookie was given the name Fig Newton, honoring the nearby town of Newton, Massachusetts. It was a practice this company used in naming its baked treats.
It is believed that Roser based his recipe on fig rolls, until then a locally homemade cookie brought to the United States by British immigrants. This cookie was made of a crumbly pastry with a jammy scoop of fig in the center.
In 1898 William Moore of New York bought out eight bakeries including Kennedy to start the New York Biscuit Company. When it merged with the American Biscuit Company, it became the National Biscuit Company, later known as Nabisco.
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