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Fig Preserves
Pick the figs fully ripe the evening before. Cut off about half the stem, and let them soak all night in very weak salt and water. Drain off the salt water in the morning and cover them with fresh. Make a thick syrup, allowing three-quarters pound loaf sugar to each pound fruit. When it boils, drop the figs carefully in and let them cook till they look clear. When done take from the fire and season with extract of lemon or ginger. The figs must not be peeled, as the salt water removes the roughness from the skin and keeps the fruit firm and hard.--Miss A. S.
TOMATO PRESERVES (either ripe or green).
The day before preserving, peel and weigh eight pounds pale yellow, pear-shaped or round tomatoes, not quite ripe; spread on dishes alternate layers of tomato and sugar, mixing with the latter the grated rind and juice of four lemons. In the morning, drain off the juice and sugar and boil to a thick syrup. Drop in half the tomatoes and boil till transparent. Take up with a perforated spoon and put on dishes to cool. Then carry the other half through exactly the same process. Then strain the juice, wash the kettle, and put in the juice again. When it boils hard, put in again the first boiled tomatoes. Take them out when they become amber color, and put in the rest. When they are all boiled to an amber color, and cooled on dishes, put them in half-gallon glass jars, and add the syrup after it has been boiled to a thick jelly.--Mrs. S. T.
Both of these are open-kettle preserves: fruit boiled in syrup, cooled on dishes in the open air, then ladled into jars with no heat processing and no measured acid. That method is no longer considered safe for either fruit, and the fig recipe compounds it with an overnight salt soak at room temperature. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than offering substitutions; for fig or tomato preserves, use a current tested recipe from a food-safety extension service.
- Figs are low-acid fruitFresh figs sit right around pH 4.6, the line above which Clostridium botulinum can grow in a sealed, oxygen-poor jar. Modern tested fig preserve recipes require added lemon juice or citric acid in a measured amount precisely for this reason; this one adds only an optional flavouring extract at the end.
- No processing step at allThe tomato preserve is cooked, then deliberately cooled on open dishes before jarring; the fig recipe gives no jarring or processing instruction whatever. Cooling on dishes drops the contents well below any pasteurising temperature and exposes them to airborne yeasts, moulds and handling contamination, and the jars are then closed without a boiling-water bath. Seal integrity is left entirely to chance.
- Half-gallon jarsThe tomato recipe specifies half-gallon glass jars. Modern canning guidance excludes that size from nearly all processes because heat cannot reliably penetrate the centre of so large a volume; pints and quarts are the practical limit.
- The overnight salt soakStemmed figs held all night in weak brine at room temperature are a warm, wet, nutrient-rich medium. The original says the salt water removes the roughness from the skin and keeps the fruit firm and hard, but whatever the effect, this is unrefrigerated holding of cut fruit for eight hours or more.
- Sugar too low to preserveThree-quarters of a pound of sugar per pound of fruit is below the equal-weight ratio usual in preserving, and nothing in the text establishes whether the finished product reaches the roughly 65 percent soluble solids that makes a jam or jelly self-preserving. Combined with low acidity and no processing, little in the jar can be relied on to keep it.
- Vocabulary, for reading the pageLoaf sugar is refined cane sugar, sold in cones and broken up for use; plain granulated sugar is its descendant. "Extract of lemon" is an alcohol-based flavouring oil, far stronger than lemon juice and contributing no acid. "Pear-shaped" pale yellow tomatoes are the small paste and preserving varieties still sold as yellow pear.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, belongs to the community-cookbook tradition in which recipes travelled as personal formulas rather than tested procedures. Figs grew readily in the tidewater and lower South, and preserving them whole in heavy syrup was the standard way to hold a crop that bruises within a day of picking; the salt soak, which the original says removes roughness and keeps the fruit firm, is a genuinely old technique. Tomato preserves, treated here as a sweetmeat rather than a condiment, were common in nineteenth-century American books at a time when the tomato was still often handled as a fruit. What both recipes lack is any notion of processing: the science connecting sealed low-acid jars to botulism was not established until the early twentieth century, and pressure and boiling-water methods with measured times reached home kitchens later still. Open-kettle canning of this kind was ordinary household practice for generations, and spoilage was simply expected some of the time.