When figs are in season, make this simple recipe for fresh fig preserves, and enjoy sweet figs all year long! Gram's fig preserves are great spread on a piece of buttered toast, spooned over pound cake or even baked into her special
fig spice cake.
This is a hard post to write without getting maudlin but I
will try. As my handful of Twitter
followers and Facebook friends know, we spent last weekend in New Iberia,
Louisiana with my aged grandmother. She
is 98 1/2 years old which means (thanks to my friend, Jacky’s Gran, who
started counting the year she was in at 93, rather than birthdays) she is in
her 99th year. Pretty
impressive, I think!
My father and aunt
have organized a lovely nurse/caretaker to come in Monday through Friday to
care for her while my uncle, who lives with her, is off at work. On the evenings and weekends, he is in charge
and is doing a good job. As we said to
him, upon questions about the medications, he hasn’t killed her yet, so we
figure he knows what he is doing. (Why
he didn’t throw us out, I do not know.)
Goodness knows, she has two different sets of pills, morning and evening, and
if he can keep those straight, more power to him! We are grateful!
We arrived around 3:45 in the afternoon on Friday and her
lovely nurse/caretaker, Tina, was still there to greet us. Bless her, then she stayed late just to make
conversation and get to know us because her normal hours are 8 a.m. to 4
p.m. She calls my grandmother Ms.
Margaret.
Her real name is Marguerite
but throughout my childhood, her friends called her Mag or Maggie. On official records, her name is Margaret
because when she started school back in 1919, French was forbidden and
Marguerite would have been part of that prohibition. Her name was changed to Margaret to conform
to the no-French rule. Imagine!
Both my maternal
grandfather and my paternal grandmother did not learn English till they started
school at six years old and the system - and the teachers - tried to stamp it out
of them. The shame of that was that the
next two generations of Acadiana French children were not allowed to speak
their mother tongue at school and gradually it died out. (My grandparents’ generation still spoke it
amongst themselves because it is hard to smother a child’s mother tongue.) I think my grandparents’ generation was the
last to speak it fluently in Louisiana. I’ve been told that the public schools are teaching French again, but it
is not the same. More's the pity.
Anyhoo, Tina got us talking about the character that my
grandmother must have been when she was younger and telling stories on her. Oh, my goodness, the stories we could
tell. Gram was the best grandmother
ever. No was not in her vocabulary. “Gram, can we have some baby aspirin? (They
tasted like orange Tic Tacs and we loved them.) The answer was “Sure. Help yourself.”
“Gram, can we borrow your steak knives? We want to have a knife throwing contest in
the yard.” - “You know where they are.” I don’t even remember her saying, “just be
careful.” But, in fairness, possibly she
did. And we lit bonfires, with
permission – we mostly did ask, to our credit - and took group bubble baths and
climbed trees, higher than was ever safe. And once we even took off walking to my other grandmother’s house a few
miles away. Why? Who the heck remembers? Unsupervised much? Blissfully so.
While cooking in my grandmother’s kitchen this past weekend,
I discovered a drawer full of her old cookbooks and asked if I might take them
home to look through them more carefully. (Cousins reading this, please know that I WILL RETURN THEM.) You know that the woman who let us take her
steak knives in the yard for a knife-throwing contest (which, by the way, ended
up with a knife up in my foot and a tetanus shot for yours truly) did not tell
me no. So I have a whole box of mostly
cr*p cookbooks with the occasional gem in her handwriting, which is what I am
looking for.
I discovered this one before we even left her kitchen. Written on the front of a Steen Syrup
giveaway pamphlet in my grandmother's handwriting.
“Gram,” I said. “Is
this your recipe for the fig preserves you always made?” “Yes,” she said. It couldn’t be more simple.
Gram’s Fig Preserves
It doesn't get any easier than this - just two ingredients - figs and sugar - in a two to one ratio, for a whole lot of wonderful.
Ingredients - to make two pint jars
2.2 pounds or 1 kg or 5 1/2 generous
cups of fresh figs
2 3/4 cups or 620g sugar
Method
Rinse the fresh figs well and discard the
rinsing water. If your figs have hard stems, cut them off and discard.
Pour the sugar over the drained figs in a heavy-bottomed
pot.
Put it on a medium flame, covered. You don't need to add water as this gets really juicy fairly quickly but that is a good
thing. Cook for a while, perhaps half an hour, stirring very
gently occasionally. You do not want the figs to break up. Gram always had whole figs in her preserve jars and so should you.
After about the first half hour, when all the sugar has dissolved, you can turn the heat up to
medium high and take the lid off. Cook until
the syrup reduces by at least half.
Meanwhile, sterilize your jars/lids by pouring boiling water
in them. Then put one metal teaspoon in
each jar. This will keep the jars from breaking when you
pour the boiling hot preserves in them.
 |
| 2 half pint jars and 1 pint jar |
When I cooked this down, I got 2 whole pints of preserved
figs out of 5 1/2 cups or 1 kilo of figs and 2 3/4 cups or 620g of sugar.
Using a jam jar funnel, divide the figs and boiling syrup
evenly between the jars. Screw the lids
on very tightly, with a dry towel and set them upside down. As they cool, a vacuum seal will form and the
preserves will be safe to eat for several weeks.
We bought the fresh figs at the Farmers’ Market on Main
Street in New Iberia because Gram’s tree was hit by lightening a number of years
ago and her replacement trees (planted with cuttings from my other grandmother’s tree!) are not producing
yet. I’ve decided that the best thing I could do was to pack them up nicely and mail them on to her to enjoy. When
you are 98 and 1/2, people should be making fig preserves for you. Don’t you agree?
Enjoy!
