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Figs, Preserved
Take small green figs, wipe, and put them into cold water; do this in the morning, and the next day simmer them till tender. Put them into cold water for three days, changing it each day. Try if they are soft enough for a pin's head to pierce them easily; if so, weigh them, and to each pound of fruit allow a pound of sugar. Clarify the sugar, and put the figs into it while it is hot. Simmer for ten or twelve minutes. In a couple of days add the thin rind of a lemon and a little ginger to the syrup, and heat the figs in it again; do this twice, divide the figs in it again; do this twice, divide the figs into halves, and put them, in their syrup, into pots. Tie down closely.
A long, slow preserve of unripe figs in the old style, spread over the best part of a week. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings are calendar timings rather than clock timings, and the recipe assumes several kitchen conventions that have since dropped out of use.
- The hinge: unripe figsThis only works with hard green figs picked before they soften and sweeten. A ripe supermarket fig will collapse in the first simmer. Green figs turn up at Middle Eastern and Mediterranean greengrocers in early summer; they need the long soaking to draw out the bitter latex.
- The three-day soakChanging the water daily is not a fussy flourish. Unripe figs are astringent and their milky sap is an irritant, and the repeated changes leach it out. Skipping it leaves a harsh, astringent preserve.
- "Clarify the sugar"The Victorian method: dissolve the sugar in water, bring to a boil with a little beaten egg white, and skim off the grey scum that rises; the proportions varied from book to book. Modern refined sugar needs none of this; simply make a syrup of equal weights sugar and water and bring it to the boil.
- A pin's headThe doneness test means a pin should pass through the flesh with no resistance. Under-cooked figs will stay leathery no matter how long they sit in syrup.
- A printer's slip"...and put them, in their syrup, into pots" is preceded by a repeated phrase; the sense is that the reheating in spiced syrup is done twice over two days or so, after which the figs are halved and potted.
- The gingerMost likely dried root ginger, a bruised knob of it, rather than ground or crystallised, though the recipe says only "a little ginger". A thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, sliced, gives a cleaner result; remove it with the lemon rind before potting.
- Repeated short boilsThe point of heating the figs two or three times over several days rather than boiling them hard once is osmotic: the sugar migrates into the fruit gradually and the figs stay whole instead of shrivelling. Do not shortcut it.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- "Tie down closely" meant a paper or bladder cover over an earthenware pot, kept in a cold larder. Use sterilised jars with proper lids, and keep them in the refrigerator once opened; if you want them shelf-stable, follow a current water-bath processing schedule for fruit in syrup.
Preserving unripe green figs whole in heavy syrup is an old Mediterranean and Levantine practice, and it depends on plentiful sugar and on figs picked deliberately before ripening. The technique on show here -- repeated brief boilings with days of rest between them -- is the same one used for candied peel, angelica and glace cherries, and it survives in the Greek and Cypriot spoon sweets (glyko syko) still served with coffee. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades afterwards, was written for households with a cook, a cold larder and time; a preserve that occupies a corner of the kitchen for a week made perfect sense in that setting. Lemon rind and dried ginger are a common Victorian pairing for a heavy fruit syrup, there to cut sweetness that would otherwise be relentless.