Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Fig Preserves
Gather fruit when fully ripe, but not cracked open; place in a perforated tin bucket or wire basket, and dip for a moment into a deep kettle of hot and moderately strong lye (some prefer letting them lie an hour in lime-water and afterwards drain); make a syrup in proportion of one pound sugar to one of fruit, and when the figs are well drained, put them in syrup and boil until well cooked remove, boil syrup down until there is just enough to cover fruit put fruit back in syrup, let all boil, and seal up while hot in glass or porcelain jars. - Ex-Gov. Stearns, Florida .
This is a genuine preserve recipe, but two of its core steps are ones no current guideline will support: an unmeasured lye bath and open-kettle sealing. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- The lye dip is the first problem"Hot and moderately strong lye" is sodium or potassium hydroxide at an unstated concentration, and strength could vary considerably between homemade and commercial preparations of the period. Lye is caustic to skin, eyes and lungs, and there is no way to judge from this text how much of it ends up in or on the fruit.
- Lye also raises the pH of the fruitThe dip was meant to check the skins so syrup could penetrate, but an alkaline treatment pushes the fruit further away from the acidity that keeps preserves safe. That works directly against the one factor that makes a boiling-water process adequate.
- Figs are borderline low-acid to begin withRipe figs commonly test around pH 4.6 to 5.0, which is at or above the cutoff for safe water-bath canning. Modern fig preserve directions add measured lemon juice or citric acid for exactly this reason; this recipe adds none.
- Sealing hot is not processing"Seal up while hot" is open-kettle canning. The jar is closed on the strength of the syrup's heat alone, with no timed boiling-water or pressure process, so anything introduced during the transfer from kettle to jar is sealed in with it.
- Clostridium botulinum is the specific riskIn a sealed, oxygen-free, low-acid, room-temperature jar, botulinum spores can germinate and produce toxin. Boiling the syrup kills vegetative cells but not spores, and the toxin gives no reliable warning in smell, taste or appearance.
- Lime-water is no better as an alternativeThe variant of soaking an hour in lime-water is calcium hydroxide, also strongly alkaline and also unmeasured. It firms the fruit and lowers acidity in the same unhelpful direction.
- The sugar ratio is not a substitute for acidPound-for-pound sugar to fruit gives a heavy syrup, and high sugar concentration does inhibit many spoilage organisms, but it is not sufficient on its own in a sealed low-acid jar.
- If you want fig preservesUse a current tested recipe from a state extension service or the USDA guide, which will specify added acid, jar size, headspace and a timed process. Nothing in the paragraph above can be adjusted into that.
Fig preserving is often said to have been common in Gulf Coast and Florida households, where dooryard fig trees produced far more fruit than could be eaten fresh in the few weeks they ripened, and an alkaline dip in lye or lime-water is a frequently recorded method for breaking the tough skin so syrup could get in. The attribution to "Ex-Gov. Stearns, Florida" points to Marcellus Stearns, who served as governor of Florida during Reconstruction in the mid-1870s; contributed recipes from public figures were a common way for community and regional cookbooks of this period to lend authority to a page. The safety warning printed above the text is a modern editorial addition and not part of the original book, which was published decades before the mechanism of botulism in home-canned goods was understood and before pressure canning reached domestic kitchens.