Fig Jam
If dried steam first till very soft. If fresh and ripe place them in a double-boiler, heating through perfectly but adding no water. They may be steamed instead.
Add about one-half their weight then of sugar and cook down carefully till thick. Lemon juice and peel, pineapple or other decided fruit may be added for flavouring. This if preferred may be rubbed through a coarse sieve and heated again before sealing in little pots or jars.
A jam with no water, no pectin and no fixed quantities: the fruit is cooked down in its own juice until thick. Everything hinges on the sugar being weighed against the fruit rather than measured by cup.
- The half-weight ruleWeigh the softened figs, then add half that weight in sugar — 2 lb prepared fruit takes 1 lb sugar. That is a low-sugar jam by preserving standards.
- Dried figs firstSteam dried figs until they collapse under a spoon; 30-45 minutes is a reasonable guide. The original calls for steaming only — simmering them covered in water and reserving the drained liquid is a departure from it. Stem them and snip out any hard blossom ends before cooking.
- Why the double boilerFigs are dense with sugar and scorch fast over direct heat. The double boiler is there to bring fresh fruit to a soft, juicy state without catching. The original does not say where the cooking down should happen; moving it to a wide heavy pan over direct heat once the sugar is in, so the wide surface drives off water, is a modern suggestion.
- Figs have almost no pectinFigs are low in pectin, so expect a thick, sticky, spoonable preserve rather than a firm set. The lemon juice and peel offered in the original may help as well as flavour: acid and the pectin in the peel both contribute. As a modern check, cook to about 220F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful on a chilled plate wrinkles when pushed.
- "Decided fruit" for flavourFig on its own is sweet and flat. The suggestions — lemon, pineapple — are there for acid and sharpness. The juice and grated zest of one lemon per 2 lb of fruit is a sound starting point; add it near the end so the aroma survives.
- The sieve stepRubbing the jam through a coarse sieve removes skins and some of the seeds, giving a smoother conserve. The original treats this as optional and says only that it should be heated again before it goes into jars. Skip the sieve if you want the seeds, which many modern fig jams keep.
- Storing itFigs are a low-acid fruit and this recipe gives no processing time. Treat it as a refrigerator jam — into clean jars, cooled, and used within a month — or freeze it. If you want shelf-stable jars, follow a current tested fig jam recipe with its specified added lemon juice and water-bath time; the old instruction to simply "seal" is not a process.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of prepared figs with 1 lb sugar gives about three to four half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Fig preserving is one of the oldest uses of the fruit: figs dry easily and keep for months, so cooks in fig-growing regions had a year-round supply of the raw material long before refrigeration, and jam was a way to use fruit too ripe or too bruised to dry. Figs carried a long-standing reputation as mildly laxative, noted in cookbooks and patent-medicine advertising alike. Dried Smyrna figs imported from Turkey were widely available to American readers of this period.