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Pickled Figs
Five quarts of figs with stems. They must be half ripe. Put them in salt water for twelve hours. Dry and parboil in alum water, using alum the size of half a nutmeg, or put them in lime water. Do not break them. Wash in clear water and dry. Make a syrup of one pint of strong vinegar and a very little water and one pound of sugar. Flavor with mace, cinnamon, and cloves. When the syrup has boiled, put in the figs. Use glass jars.
Pickled Figs No. 2 Eight pounds of white figs, two pounds of sugar, one pint of vinegar, one quart of water, cinnamon, and cloves to taste. Boil all together until a silver fork will pierce the figs. Can hot in glass jars.
Two versions of a sweet fig pickle, both written for the open-kettle method that home canning guidance abandoned decades ago. The notes below explain the archaic language and then why neither version should be put up as printed.
- Acidity is the problemFigs are a low-acid fruit, typically pH 4.6 to 5.5, which puts them in the range where Clostridium botulinum can grow in a sealed jar. No. 2 dilutes one pint of vinegar with a full quart of water across eight pounds of fruit; nothing in that ratio guarantees the finished pickle is acid enough to be safely shelf stable. Any fig pickle intended for storage needs a tested, measured acid level from a current source.
- "Can hot in glass jars" is open-kettle canningLadling hot fruit into jars and letting the lids seal as they cool was standard practice when this book was written and is no longer accepted. The seal is unreliable and nothing in the process brings the sealed jar to a temperature that addresses spoilage organisms in a low-acid fruit.
- AlumFood-grade potassium alum was the standard crisping agent and is still sold, but modern practice has largely dropped it: it contributes little firmness to a fruit this soft and can leave an astringent taste. "The size of half a nutmeg" is a lump measure of perhaps half a teaspoon to a teaspoon, though the original is genuinely imprecise here.
- Lime waterThe alternative soak is calcium hydroxide, pickling lime, dissolved in water. It is strongly alkaline, it firms fruit by reacting with pectin, and any residue left on the fruit raises the pH of the finished jar. Recipes that use it call for repeated soaking in fresh water afterwards; this one calls only for a single wash in clear water.
- Archaic measuresA quart of figs is a volume, not a weight, so five quarts is somewhere around six to seven pounds of whole fruit. "Strong vinegar" in this period meant roughly 4 to 6 percent acetic acid, comparable to modern cider or distilled vinegar, but the strength was never certain from barrel to barrel.
- "Half ripe"Green-shouldered figs that still hold their shape, picked with the stem attached so the fruit does not weep. Fully ripe figs collapse in the syrup, which is why the first version specifies underripe fruit; the second says nothing about ripeness.
- If you want to make fig pickleUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority with stated vinegar strength, jar size and boiling-water processing time. The flavour profile here, vinegar, sugar, mace, cinnamon and clove, is the part worth carrying over.
Sweet spiced fruit pickles were a fixture of Southern American preserving, and figs, which crop heavily and all at once in the Gulf states, were an obvious candidate: a household with a mature tree faced more fruit in a fortnight than it could eat. The salt soak followed by alum or lime water is an old firming sequence borrowed from cucumber pickling, meant to keep whole fruit from turning to pulp in hot syrup, and it appears in dozens of nineteenth-century manuals. The vinegar-and-sugar syrup with mace, cinnamon and clove descends from the much older English tradition of pickling fruit as an accompaniment to cold meat rather than as a sweet. That this book gives two versions, one heavily treated and one simply boiled together, may hint that the elaborate soaking steps were losing ground to speed, though a single book is thin evidence for dating such a shift.