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Fig Jelly
Wash the figs, and add water enough to cover the fruit. Boil twenty minutes, strain, then add sugar, and boil ten to twenty minutes. XI. Syrups.
SYRUPS are used principally for their medicinal qualities. Blackberry and elderberry are generally used, but all fruits have more or less cooling, anti-febrile qualities. The directions here given will apply as well to any other berries of which the extract can be gotten, as to blackberries.
A three-line jelly with almost every quantity left to the cook's judgment. The lines about syrups belong to the next section of the book and have nothing to do with the figs.
- The setting problem comes firstFigs are low in both pectin and acid, which is why fig "jelly" of this kind usually finishes as a loose syrup rather than a firm set. Modern practice adds lemon juice and commercial pectin, or combines the fig juice with a high-pectin fruit such as tart apple.
- Sugar is unmeasuredNo proportion is given. The common rule for a strained fruit juice is three-quarters to one cup of sugar per cup of juice, measured after straining, but the original leaves this genuinely open.
- Water enough to coverThe original fixes no quantity; how much water it takes depends entirely on the pan and the fruit. The more water you add, the longer the second boil must run to concentrate the juice.
- Straining"Strain" here means a jelly bag or several layers of damp cheesecloth, left to drip rather than squeezed. Pressing the pulp forces fig fibre through and the result turns cloudy.
- The second boilTen to twenty minutes is a rough guide; go by temperature instead. Sheeting off a spoon, or 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, is the endpoint.
- Fig skins and stemsThe recipe says only to wash the figs. Trimming the stem ends before boiling is usual modern practice, since the stems are tough.
- If you want to put it upThe recipe gives no sealing, jar or processing instructions at all. Because figs are a low-acid fruit, use a current tested preserving recipe with measured added acid and a specified water-bath time rather than improvising from these lines.
- YieldAbout two half-pint jars from 2 lb of figs, depending on how far the juice is reduced. Eat it fresh from the refrigerator within a few weeks if you are not canning it properly.
Fig preserving recipes cluster in American household books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a practical reason: the fig is a Gulf and Southern dooryard tree that fruits heavily and all at once, and the fresh fruit bruises and ferments within days of picking. Cooks who could not ship a fig crop turned it into preserves, jam, syrup and, as here, a strained jelly. The entry is very brief, giving only boiling times and no instruction on hanging a jelly bag or testing for a set. The stray paragraph on syrups that follows shows the other half of the domestic fruit economy of the period, in which blackberry and elderberry extracts were kept in the house as much for their supposed cooling and "anti-febrile" effect as for flavour.