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Fig Preserves
Take three fourths a pound of sugar and half a cup of water to each pound of figs. Make a syrup of the sugar and water, skim, add the figs, carefully washed and dried, and let simmer until the skin of the figs is tender, then store as any preserves. For a less sweet dish use a cup of sugar and a cup of water to enough figs to fill a quart jar; make the syrup and let cook as before, but store as canned fruit in sterile jars, filled to overflow and sealed with rubbers and sterile covers. Lemon or orange rind and juice or sherry wine, all in quantity according to taste, may be added.
Glacéd Crab Apples (Miss Reece) Select a hard, red variety of crab apples.
Use only perfect fruit. For a peck of apples take five pounds of granulated sugar. Wash and wipe the fruit, leaving on the stems if desired; put the fruit and sugar in stone jars or casseroles, in layers, adding cinnamon and cassia buds to taste. Cover the jars with a buttered paper. Bake in a slow oven two and one half hours. These may be stored as canned fruit, but will keep in earthen jars some time.
Preserved Limes (Doctor C. F. Langworthy) Lay the limes in salt and water brine, strong enough to bear up an egg, cover closely, and let them remain in the brine until warm weather is over. Before preserving, cut into them sufficiently so that the seeds may be removed, and place in cold water for a day, changing the water often enough to remove all the salt. Boil in water (to which soda in the proportion of one teaspoonful to six quarts has been added) until so tender that a straw may be put through and then soak again in cold water for a day, changing the water often. To each pound of fruit allow two and a half pounds of white sugar and three pints of water. Boil the syrup for fifteen minutes and then add the fruit. Cook for five minutes and place the fruit in jars. After cooking the syrup for fifteen minutes more, pour over the fruit, filling the jars. Such preserved limes, it is said, will keep for years.
Three preserving recipes run together here, and all three end in the same place: fruit sealed into jars with no measured processing. The vocabulary is worth decoding even though the methods are not usable.
- Figs are low-acid, and that is the problemFresh figs sit around pH 4.6-5.0, right at or above the line below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Current tested procedures for fig preserves require added acid — bottled lemon juice in a measured amount — plus a timed boiling-water process. Neither appears here.
- "Store as any preserves" means open-kettle canningHot fruit ladled into hot jars and sealed, with no processing after sealing. The seal is unreliable and nothing kills what lands in the jar during filling. The second, less-sweet version is worse still: less sugar, less preservation, same absent process.
- Rubbers and sterile coversJars closed with a flat rubber ring, used with either a glass lid and wire bail or a zinc screw cap; both were common in this period. The rings perished with age and these closures cannot be relied on, and a modern two-piece lid does not make an unprocessed jar safe.
- The lime brine"Strong enough to bear up an egg" indicates a strong brine, in the region of 10 per cent salt rather than a saturated one, and it is an eyeball measure. The fruit sits in it at room temperature from one season into the next. Unmeasured brine held for months without temperature control is exactly the case where a current, tested recipe should be used instead.
- Soda in the boiling waterA teaspoon of baking soda to six quarts softens the tough lime peel by attacking the pectin. It works, but it also pushes the fruit further from the acidity that keeps preserved citrus stable.
- A peckFor crab apples, 10 to 12 lb. Five pounds of sugar to that is a light hand by preserving standards of the day.
- "Slow oven" and "casseroles"The book gives no temperatures; "slow oven" in period usage covers roughly 250-325F. "Casseroles" here means the vessel -- a lidded earthenware or stoneware pot -- not a baked dish. Buttered paper over the top is a grease-proof cover to stop the surface fruit drying.
- Cassia budsSold as the "buds" of the cassia tree, though botanically they are the dried immature fruit and receptacle rather than flower buds. Once a common pickling and preserving spice and still sold by spice merchants; they taste like a milder, fruitier cinnamon, and whole cinnamon stick is the usual stand-in.
Two of these recipes carry contributors' names -- Miss Reece for the crab apples, Doctor C. F. Langworthy for the limes -- which is part of why they read in different voices; the fig preserve here is unattributed. The Langworthy name is a real one: C. F. Langworthy was a chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Experiment Stations, one of the government figures who spent the first decades of the twentieth century putting American food on a scientific footing through the department's farmers' bulletins. His presence in a home preserving book is a fair snapshot of the moment -- household cookery and federal nutrition work were in close conversation, and the same period produced the pressure-canning and acidity research that eventually made recipes like these obsolete. Heavy sugar-syrup fig preserves, often lifted with lemon or orange rind, are strongly associated with the American South, where the crop ripens faster than a household can eat it. Salting limes down until the hot months pass, then leaching, softening and candying them, is a much older technique with parallels in the salt-preserved citrus traditions of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.