Skip to main content
Dessert

Fig Jam

A jam made from peeled figs, sugar, and lemon juice, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Fig and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 763 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fig Jam

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the peeled figs and sugar in a pot.

  2. Add lemon juice to taste, but do not add water.

  3. Cook over medium heat for 1 hour or longer, stirring occasionally.

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 + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Provide the fruit bulk and pectin-free body that forms the jam's thick texture as it cooks down.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps thicken it while preserving the fruit's color and flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet fig flavor and helps the jam set.

The step that matters

Cook over medium heat for 1 hour or longer, stirring occasionally. Jam thickens as water evaporates and sugar concentrates. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long or without stirring can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fig, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes