Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Fig Preserves
Gather fruit when fully ripe, but not cracked open; place in a perforated tin bucket or wire basket, and dip for a moment into a deep kettle of hot and moderately strong lye (some prefer letting them lie an hour in lime-water and afterwards drain); make a syrup in proportion of one pound sugar to one of fruit, and when the figs are well drained, put them in syrup and boil until well cooked; remove, boil syrup down until there is just enough to cover fruit; put fruit back in syrup, let all boil, and seal up while hot in glass or porcelain jars. - Ex-Gov. Stearns, Florida.
Two separate problems put this one out of reach: an unmeasured caustic dip with no rinse, and an open-kettle seal on a fruit that sits at the edge of the low-acid range.
- The lye dip is unquantified"Hot and moderately strong lye" in 1877 meant whatever came off the household ash hopper or out of a can of concentrated lye, with no stated strength or temperature. Lye peeling is still used commercially on peaches and olives, but under controlled concentration, time and temperature, followed by thorough rinsing and neutralisation.
- No rinse stepThe recipe moves straight from the dip to draining to the syrup. Commercial lye peeling always ends in thorough rinsing, because boiling in sugar syrup is not a reliable way to remove caustic residue from the fruit surface. As written, whatever lye clings to the figs goes into the jar.
- Figs are not a high-acid fruitRipe figs typically test around pH 4.6 or above, which puts them on the wrong side of the line that keeps Clostridium botulinum dormant. Current canning practice requires added acid (lemon juice) for figs precisely for this reason. Sugar concentration alone is not a reliable control here.
- Open-kettle sealing"Seal up while hot" is the nineteenth-century method: hot product into a hot jar, lid on, no further heat. It has been rejected for decades because it neither vents the jar properly nor destroys spoilage organisms on the jar rim and lid, and the seal it forms is unreliable.
- The lime-water variantThe parenthetical alternative, an hour in lime-water, is calcium hydroxide, also caustic and also traditionally followed by rinsing. The recipe omits the rinse there too.
- What the dip was forNeither treatment is flavouring. Lye checks and softens the fig skin so syrup penetrates; lime firms the flesh so the fruit holds its shape through long boiling. Both are working steps that a modern fig preserve simply does without.
- If you want fig preservesUse a current tested recipe with weighed fruit and sugar, added lemon juice, and a boiling-water process timed for your altitude.
Buckeye Cookery drew heavily on recipes mailed in by readers and notables, and the attribution here is to Marcellus L. Stearns, the Reconstruction-era governor of Florida in the mid-1870s, which is why an Ohio compilation carries a Southern fruit at all. Figs grew well in the Southern dooryard and had a short, awkward season: fully ripe they split and spoil within a day or two, so preserving in heavy syrup was one of the few ways to keep a crop. The lye or lime dip belonged to a whole family of alkaline kitchen treatments of the period, the same chemistry that produced hominy from field corn and firmed watermelon rind for pickling, and in an era when lye was made at home from wood ashes the recipe gives no measure of its strength at all. That casual approach to a caustic, and the open-kettle seal that closes the recipe, are exactly the two things later food science has ruled out.