Fig Candy
Boil over a slow fire one pound of sugar and a half pint of water until the syrup hardens when dropped into cold water. Add half a teaspoon of vinegar and remove from the fire, stirring once or twice before pouring over a layer of figs placed in deep dish. Dried figs may be used either previously soaked an hour in cold water, or those perfectly dry. They are more apt to give good results than the fresh figs.
A simple hard-crack sugar syrup poured over figs. The only tricky part is the sugar, and the original gives you the test you need rather than a temperature.
- The hinge: the cold-water test"Hardens when dropped into cold water" reads as the hard-crack stage, usually given as 300-310F (150-155C), though the wording alone does not exclude a firmer ball stage. At hard crack a drop forms a brittle thread that snaps rather than bending; short of that the coating stays tacky and the candy will weep.
- Half a pint of waterOne cup to the pound of sugar (about 2 1/4 cups granulated). The proportion barely matters, since all the water boils off before hard crack; it only sets how long you wait.
- The vinegarAn acid can invert a little of the sugar and discourage the syrup from crystallising into a grainy mass; a pinch of cream of tartar or a spoonful of corn syrup is used the same way. The recipe adds it before the pan comes off the fire and then stirs only once or twice: agitating hot syrup is what triggers graining.
- "Slow fire"Gentle, low heat, and no stirring once the sugar has dissolved. Wash any crystals down from the sides of the pan with a wet brush before the syrup comes to the boil.
- Choice of figsThe book is right that dried figs behave better: fresh figs release water into the syrup and soften the coating. Use whole dried Mission or Calimyrna figs, stems trimmed. If you soak them, drain and blot them thoroughly dry, or the syrup will spit.
- The dishThe recipe calls for a deep dish; butter it or line it with parchment, and set the figs in a single close layer so the syrup fills the gaps rather than pooling.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantity of figs; as a rough guide a pound of sugar will coat something like 1 to 1 1/2 lb of dried figs. Break or cut apart when fully cold and store airtight; humidity will make the shell sticky within a day or two.
Fig candy of this kind belongs to a long tradition of preserving fruit in sugar. Recipe books of the period leaned hard on the cold-water test because domestic candy thermometers were still uncommon, and the vocabulary of that test -- thread, soft ball, hard ball, crack -- did the work a number does now. The note that dried figs give better results than fresh is a practical admission as much as a preference: fresh figs bruise and ferment within days and rarely travelled far.