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Dessert

Fresh Fig Preserves

A preserve made by simmering figs with sugar and water, then sealing in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fresh Fig Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the figs

  1. Dip the figs in hot lye and wipe each one with a coarse, dry cloth to smooth the skin.

Make the syrup

  1. In a kettle, combine the water, sugar, and lemon extract; boil and skim until clear.

Cook and seal

  1. Add the figs and simmer until they are transparent.

  2. Transfer to preserve jars and seal.

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

Southern figs
Provide the fruit that softens and turns translucent in the sugar syrup.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the preserves and helps set the fruit by drawing out water.
Clear water
Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup the figs simmer in.

The step that matters

Simmer the figs until transparent. Simmering slowly lets sugar gradually replace the water in the fig tissue. Boiling hard can break the fruit apart and cloud the syrup, so the figs should stay whole and clear.

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.

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