About National Fig Newton Day
Newtons are a Nabisco-trademarked version of a pastry filled with sweet fruit paste. Fig Newtons were the most famous. In other parts of the world, they are known as Fig Rolls.
Back in the late 1800s, doctors were recommending different treatments to cure stomach ailments. For instance, they would tell patients with stomach ailments to eat biscuits and fig jam.
As a result biscuits with a fig jam rolled into pastry dough were sold at a Philadelphia bakery. In 1891 Charles Roser invented a machine that inserted fig jam into a freshly baked pastry and cut to become fig rolls.
Roser sold the patent and the first fig rolls were baked at the Kennedy Steam Bakery in Cambridge, MA who then called the creation Fig Newtons after the town of Newton in Massachusetts, and have nothing to do with Sir Isaac Newton.