Stewed Figs
Figs may be stewed in three different ways, if the dried fruit is used:
No. I. Wash figs and place in cold water over night, using a pint of water to a pound of figs. Next morning bring the figs (in same water) slowly to a boil and when tender add half the quantity of sugar that there is juice, cooking down till the syrup is thick. Serve cold with cream.
No. 2. Steam the figs till soft, then place them in boiling syrup for a moment, setting them back where they will not even simmer, for twenty minutes or more, when remove the figs, cook down syrup till thick and pour it over the fruit.
No. 3. Wash and cover the figs with wine, letting stand over night. Then barely simmer till tender, treating the syrup as above.
Fresh figs require simply simmering a few moments in very little water before adding sugar, when let a syrup form before removing. Pineapple, ginger, lemon, rhubarb, or other fruits may be used to flavour.
Three approaches to the same end: dried figs rehydrated and finished in their own syrup. The instructions assume you can judge a syrup by eye, which is the only real skill involved.
- The proportion that matters"Half the quantity of sugar that there is juice" means measure the cooking liquid after the figs are tender and add half that volume in sugar — a cup of liquid takes half a cup of sugar. Fig sugars concentrate as the syrup reduces, so err low rather than high.
- Soaking is still worth doingA pint of water to a pound of figs is about 2 cups to 450 g, and that is enough to plump them without leaving a flood to boil away. Supermarket dried figs are softer than the leathery ones this book assumes, so four to six hours will often do instead of a full night.
- StemsThe recipe does not mention it, but snip off the hard stem tips before soaking. They never soften and are unpleasant to bite.
- Don't boil them hardMethod 2's "setting them back where they will not even simmer" is the key to Methods 2 and 3; Method 1 does bring the figs to a boil. Figs held at a bare tremble stay whole and glossy; at a rolling boil the skins split and the interiors go to pulp.
- "Boiling syrup" in Method 2No quantity is given. A workable syrup is 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water, brought to the boil, enough to cover a pound of steamed figs. It thickens later when the fruit is lifted out.
- How thick is thickReduce the syrup until it coats a spoon and falls in heavy drops. The book gives no temperature; a thermometer reading in the low 220s F is a rough guide. Take it much further and the syrup will be stiff and sticky when cold.
- The wine versionMethod 3 wants a wine with body and some sweetness: port, Marsala, or a red that is not sharply tannic. A pound of figs takes about 2 cups to cover. Some of the alcohol cooks off during the simmer and reduction, though a good deal remains.
- Fresh figs"A few moments" is accurate — two or three minutes in a splash of water, then sugar. Ripe fresh figs collapse quickly and need far less handling than the dried.
- YieldA pound of dried figs serves six as a dessert with cream, and keeps a week covered in its syrup in the refrigerator.
Dried figs were one of the most reliably available fruits in a nineteenth-century American pantry, shipped in pressed layers or strung on raffia from Smyrna in Turkey — "Smyrna figs" was the trade name, and the Calimyrna variety later grown in California takes its name from that origin. Because the drying makes them keep well and the soaking restores them to something like fruit, stewed figs turn up in the winter dessert sections of household books of this period, alongside stewed prunes and apples. The three methods here reflect a real difference in kitchen economy: the overnight soak costs nothing but time, the steam-and-syrup method preserves the shape of the fruit for a company dish, and the wine version turns a cheap dried fruit into something for the dinner table. The closing note that pineapple, ginger, lemon or rhubarb may be added is typical of the fruit-cookery writing of the era, which treated the base method as a formula and left the flavouring to the cook.