Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Figs (There are two kinds of figs)
There are two kinds of figs, commonly spoken of as purple and white figs. Of these the white are best for pickles and for glacé fruit, while the purple, which must be peeled, are best for jam and thick preserves. If the purple fruit be used for canning, it must be peeled, placed in jars, and the ordinary method of canning by sterilizing in the jars followed. The white figs should be cooked in the syrup until tender, then turned into the sterilized jars. The quantity of sugar used may be varied to suit one's From half to three fourths a cup to a taste. quart jar is usually quite sweet enough.
This is a general instruction for putting up figs rather than a measured recipe, and the gap between what it assumes and what we now know about figs is exactly where it fails.
- Figs are not an acid fruitFresh figs run around pH 4.6 to 5.0, which places them at or above the boundary below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Current practice requires added acid — lemon juice at a measured rate — before figs may be canned at all. This recipe adds none.
- No processing time, no temperature"The ordinary method of canning by sterilizing in the jars" assumed a familiarity the modern reader does not have. The recipe states no time, no jar size and no method, so there is no way to know whether the contents ever reached a temperature that mattered. Use a current tested procedure instead.
- The syrup figs are worse, not betterCooking white figs in syrup and then "turning them into the sterilized jars" is open-kettle canning: hot fruit into hot jars, sealed, with no processing afterward. The seal is formed by cooling, not by heat penetration, and low-acid fruit put up this way has no safety margin at all.
- Sugar is not a preservative hereThe instruction to vary sugar to taste, as little as half a cup to the quart, is fine for flavour and useless for safety. At those concentrations the water activity remains high enough to support bacterial growth. Sugar preserves reliably only at concentrations far higher than this.
- Jam and thick preserves are a different caseThe "jam and thick preserves" the passage mentions in passing are cooked down far enough that they behave differently from whole canned fruit. Nothing in this entry tells you how to make them, so it is not a substitute set of instructions.
- What the terms mean"Glacé fruit" is fruit candied through successive sugar syrups until translucent. "Purple" and "white" figs correspond roughly to dark-skinned varieties such as Mission and pale green-gold ones such as Kadota or Adriatic; the modern names are the ones you will see at market.
Figs were a Southern and Californian crop, and a mature tree drops more fruit in a fortnight than any family can eat fresh. The division into "purple" and "white" reflects kitchen shorthand rather than botany: dark-skinned varieties were peeled away for jam, while pale figs held their shape in syrup and were prized for candying. The confidence with which the writer refers to "the ordinary method of canning by sterilizing in the jars" is itself historically telling. Processing times measured against jar size and fruit acidity came later; the science that established figs as a borderline low-acid fruit needing added lemon juice belongs to the era of government extension bulletins that followed, and it is the reason this page is worth reading rather than following.