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Dessert

Fig Preserve

A preserve made by cooking figs in a sugar syrup after soaking them in lye or lime water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and lime share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 49 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fig Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the figs

  1. Gather ripe figs that are not cracked.

  2. Place figs in a perforated tin bucket or wire basket.

  3. Dip the basket into a kettle of hot lye for a moment or soak in lime water for 1 hour.

  4. Drain the basket.

Make the preserves

  1. Make a syrup with equal parts sugar and fruit (1 pound each).

  2. Add drained figs to the syrup and cook well.

  3. Boil down the syrup until it just covers the fruit.

  4. Boil all together for 1 minute and seal in glass or porcelain jars while hot.

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 + limetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together49 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 + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe figs
Provide the fruit that cooks down into the preserve and sets its texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the syrup while helping preserve the fruit.
Lye or lime water
Firms the fig skins and flesh so the fruit holds its shape during long cooking.

The step that matters

Timing the lye or lime soak. Lye is caustic and must be handled carefully. Too brief a dip may leave the fruit soft, while too long can break it down, so the soak needs to match the method.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Limethe 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.

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