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Figs
Cut stems from figs; cover with cold water; add a slice of lemon and simmer for five minutes. Add sugar to taste and cook five minutes longer. Place in cooker for three hours.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the stovetop work only starts the dish, and the long finish happens off the heat in a box of insulation. Everything hinges on the fruit going into the cooker boiling hot.
- What the cooker wasA fireless cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, into which a tightly lidded pot of boiling food was sealed to coast down over several hours. There is no added heat; all the energy is what the pot carries in, which is why the recipe insists on simmering first.
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low, or a heavy Dutch oven brought to a boil and left in a very low (around 200F) oven, gives a broadly similar effect. A thermal vacuum pot is the closest direct descendant. Three hours is the original's figure and holds roughly true in any of them.
- Which figsIn a 1920s American kitchen this most likely means dried figs, which is why they want water, sugar and hours of gentle heat; note the recipe includes no separate soaking step. Fresh figs collapse in a fraction of that time and want no more than ten to fifteen minutes total.
- "Cover with cold water"The recipe gives no quantity; for a pound of dried figs that is roughly three cups. Dried fruit swells considerably, so use a pot with real headroom rather than a shallow pan.
- Sugar to tasteDried figs are already very sweet; start at 1/4 cup per pound and stop there unless you want a syrup. The sugar goes in after the first five minutes, as written; sugar added early can toughen fruit skins, though the recipe gives no reason.
- The lemonOne slice, peel and all, adds acid that keeps the syrup from turning cloying.
- Yield and keepingA pound of dried figs makes about four servings, good warm with cream or chilled as a breakfast compote. This is a stewed fruit, not a preserve: cover and refrigerate, and use within a week.
Fireless cookery had a serious vogue in American households between roughly 1905 and the 1920s, promoted in home-economics classes and government bulletins as a way to save fuel and to leave a dish unattended without a coal range burning all afternoon. Manufactured cookers were sold by mail order, and magazines carried plans for building one from a packing crate and hay. Slow-cooked dried fruit was among the method's best applications: figs, prunes and apricots reward long, low heat and are nearly impossible to scorch. Dried figs themselves reached American kitchens mostly from Smyrna and, increasingly by this period, from California's own Central Valley plantings.The technique fell out of use as gas and electric ranges with reliable low settings became common, then returned in the 1970s under a new name and a plug.