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Dessert

Green Fig Preserve

A preserve made by boiling green figs in a syrup of water and sugar, seasoned with cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 614 recipes. Both carry cinnamyl acetate, which smells sweet aromatic, cinnamon. The science ↓

Green Fig Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the figs

  1. Make a cross incision on the top of each fig.

  2. Soak figs overnight in brine made with 2 tablespoons of salt and 6 pints of water.

  3. Rinse figs thoroughly in fresh water.

  4. Boil figs for 30 minutes or until tender, then drain.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup using the water from boiling the figs, with equal weight of sugar to figs and 3 cups of water for every cup of sugar.

  2. Add figs and a piece of stick cinnamon to the boiling syrup.

  3. Cook for about 2 hours until the figs are clear and transparent.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Fig + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together614 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Fig + sugartop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Figs
Form the bulk of the preserve and become tender and translucent as they cook in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at equal weight to the figs, helps preserve them and set the syrup.

The step that matters

Cooking the figs in syrup for about 2 hours. Cooking long and slowly lets sugar gradually replace the water in the fig tissue, so the figs turn clear and transparent. Cooking too briskly can toughen or break the figs and leave them cloudy.

Swap the fig

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figthe original
  4. Blueberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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