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Dessert

Recipe for Making Fig Candy

A candied fig confection made by boiling sugar and water, adding cream of tartar, and coating figs with the syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Recipe for Making Fig Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the candy

  1. Boil sugar and water in a saucepan until it turns amber, without stirring.

  2. Add cream of tartar just before removing from heat.

Assemble

  1. Wash the figs, cut them open, and place them in a flat dish.

  2. Pour the candy mixture over the figs.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + figtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,241 recipes

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

  3. Cream + figtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together523 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the candy base and, once caramelized, gives the dish its sweetness and amber color.
Cream of tartar
Acid that helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing, keeping the candy smooth and clear.
Figs
Provide the fruit flavor and the main body of the dish.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to amber without stirring. Sugar that is stirred while boiling can crystallize, turning grainy. Once the syrup turns amber, it is caramelizing quickly, so removing it from heat at the right moment prevents it from burning and turning bitter.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Figthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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