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Preserve

Fig Preserve

A preserve made by cooking figs with sugar and lye or lime water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 fully ripe figs, making sure they are not cracked.

  2. Dip figs in hot lye briefly, or soak them in lime water for 1 hour, then drain.

Make and seal the preserve

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

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

  3. Remove the figs and boil down the syrup until it just covers the fruit.

  4. Boil everything together for 1 minute, then 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

Fully ripe figs
Provide the fruit, flavor, and soft body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, concentrated by boiling, helps preserve it and thicken the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling down the syrup until it just covers the fruit. Boiling concentrates the sugar and water content, which helps preserve the figs and sets the syrup. Boiling too little leaves it thin and prone to spoiling; boiling too long makes it overly thick and hard.

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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