Fig.

glorying in the year's shortest season

Hi! By some stroke of luck you’re reading, “Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman.” Have you subscribed?

Photo by Katie Azi on Unsplash

Figs never took up much mental real estate. Not till I learned about fig wasps. But this is not a newsletter about fig wasps, as alarming as the concept of mummified wasps may be.

Since childhood, I’d been a fan of Fig Newton cookies and, later, Trader Joe’s “A Fig Walks Into A Bar” bars. Basically a fig bar in any form is fine by me. I liked snacking on dried figs, which are basically gigantic, misshapen raisins. Dalmatian fig jam had long been a staple on my cheese boards. I was fig-literate, or so I thought.

Then I moved to my favorite neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia, and fresh figs were suddenly - for their very brief season - ubiquitous. Big and black, small and green, plum-brown and hidden against the trunks of the tree itself. Figs everywhere.

The walled gardens of Ghent’s historic homes hold many fig trees. It’s hard to say who planted them, or why, or even what varieties they might be. No one seems to remember. I suppose figs are pretty trees, once they get a start in life. But they are slow-growing. They heavily, almost indecently, bear fruit after gaining maturity. I can’t imagine a reason that a surgeon, heiress, financier, or other inhabitants of Mowbray Arch would care to keep a fig tree. They probably keep a gardener to bother with it.

Nevertheless, the pedestrians among us benefit, as do local wildlife. If a fruit tree’s branches hang over the wall onto the public sidewalk, I consider its harvest fair game to urban foragers. Andrew, my husband, tells me I’ll probably get arrested one day. I don’t think they arrest people for pocketing crabapples, but if he’s right and I am arrested one day, I hope it’s in pursuit of a perfect fig.

During my first Ghentian fig season, I mentally mapped several fruiting trees within a short walk from my apartment, as well as a passionfruit vine, a rosemary hedge, and a large, forgotten mulberry tree staining a particularly busy street corner inky purple.

But the figs were my favorite.

Small, pale green, soft to the touch. We’d smuggle handfuls home in our pockets and break them open to eat on toast. Set against creamy goat cheese, their beautiful, coral insides gleamed with drizzled honey and sea salt flakes. Other times a call would go through the neighborhood Facebook group: someone’s tree was overproducing. She put the excess fruit in baskets on her porch, to be taken home by anyone who wanted to share in the bounty. Stop by, fill a bag, take some figs off her hands. Of course we did.

We jammed the figs. We baked them. We made savory preparations. We ate them fresh. We did virtually anything a person could do with a fig, short of pickling them -something I still want to try. Kobros Coffee, a favorite shop, even runs a fig latte each summer. They make them with fruit gathered from all over Ghent. The latte flavor runs one week only: an unofficial summer festival for the surrounding neighborhood and its trees.

When I moved away from Ghent, bereft of neighbors with fig trees, I was brought some from distant Lynchburg, hours to the West. Each purplish-brown fig nested gently in the hollow of an egg carton, making the journey across five hours of highway to my kitchen. And this year (still without fig-having neighbors) an acquaintance met me at the local library, exchanging a tote of pendulous, thunder-colored figs for my deepest gratitude. Figs seem to conjure generosity. It is their way.

Whether or not you love figs, one thing you must know: the season to enjoy them fresh is exactly six seconds long. August’s fiery dalliance with September births this Venus across the last weeks of summer. It is heady and passionate and indisputably sexy. Fig season should come with a content warning: hot and heavy stuff ahead. Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess, wrote uncomfortably about them in her Physica:

“The fruit of this tree is not good for a person who is physically healthy to eat, since it affords him pleasure and gives him a swelled mind. He will seek honors and tend toward greed, and will have changeable morals….”

Despite Hildegard’s frankly ridiculous views of a fig’s eroticism, I see how she got there: they are a deeply sensual fruit.

The skin of a ripe fig is soft and yielding. Sliced open, its cerise interior is an Impressionist painting of the female anatomy. The stem weeps white sap when broken. Even the shape of a fig is vaguely pregnant: both elegant and swollen when ripe for the harvest. Hence, figs have long been a traditional symbol of fertility and abundance from ancient times onward. Fig trees require careful tending in their early years but once grown, yield hundreds of pounds of sweet fruit within mere weeks, making them a valuable crop. And they are graceful: smooth bark, light grey and elastic.

 My affinity for figs has deepened in recent years, reaching well beyond simply enjoying the fruit. It’s the symbolism for me. The abundance, fertility, the sheer womanly glory of figs.

Over the past year my husband and I have grappled with my PCOS diagnosis, and what it means to live well with a chronic syndrome. Sometimes I struggle to maintain confidence that time and effort will balance the chaos of this. The mental weight of a chronic health concern doesn’t consume me, but it easily could. I am aware of that, of the fine line between caring well for my condition and pursuing healing, versus obsessing over the unknowns that come with it, the things I can’t control; the broken parts that feel like perhaps they’ll never be set right.

Figs, though. Figs are so exquisitely sculpted, so feminine and intact, so…unlike me. I struggle to assign these qualities to myself when my body plays its tricks. PCOS feels like the opposite of powerful femininity and abundant fertility. It can break your heart some days. Many days. Yet at the bottom of it all I also believe that I am these things as well: the beautiful creation, womanly and whole.

I dream about figs: ripe, abundant, pleated with promise of good things coming. I wake up, and life looks much as it did yesterday: precious, aching, tiring, yet agreeable. Here is one thing more to appreciate: figs represent not only femininity and prosperity, but also wisdom. Their harvest time arrives in the tired-out part of the year, the part in which we are tempted to wilt. August, having outstayed his welcome, exits in a haze. And fig season enters: you will recover, let me feed you with my sweetness.

Figs ask us to savor life in the tired places; to forage for blessing offered above our heads, drooping low over impenetrable, walled places. All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

Like manna for Israel, we cannot hold on to fresh figs. They come in a beautiful hurry, all at once, and one is hard-pressed to keep up with the event. They leave in an equal hurry: one morning every fig on the tree is gone and we are back to only graceful limbs covered in green spade-leaves; no figs till next year.

I want to be better at savoring. I want to be better at fig season. I want to open my heart that is gasping for autumn and embrace Southern Virginia’s remaining humidity and ninety-degree weather. Even when it lasts past Labor Day. Even when I was over it the day it began. Even when it feels like autumn may never come.

Autumn is coming, but figs are here.

Here, in places that feel like they lack fertility and abundance: fruit to savor. And not just fruit: the queen of fruits. It is spiritual, as so much in creation is.

I begin to look for it, to see it: happy moments together, just Andrew and I; Saturday mornings for lying-in; sleepy bodies tangled in cool sheets; belly laughs; a glass of unexpectedly good water; the last of the true golden hours; a fine thunderstorm; figs pressed into olive oil cake and baked till soft and sunken. 

Fig season is an offering to celebrate current abundance with all we are worth. Fruit for free, to any passerby. If you want it, you may take it. The choice is yours.

For now, I make the cake that has come to mean this practice of “savoring” to me. A cake baked once a year, only in fig season, only with the ripest, local figs; olive oil and almond, honey and grated apple, coriander and figs.

Will you try it too?

---

Fresh Fig & Olive Oil Cake

1/2 cup olive oil

5 Tablespoons butter, softened

3 eggs

1 1/4 cup natural cane sugar

1 cup almond meal

1 3/4 cup flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 pinch sea salt

1 cup ricotta

1/4 cup milk

1 apple, peeled and grated

zest of one lemon

3 Tablespoons honey

6 large or 8-10 small fresh figs, sliced in halves or quarters

1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a 9" spring-form pan and set aside. In a large bowl, beat butter with sugar and olive oil until fluffy. On low speed, add eggs one at a time.

2. In medium bowl whisk together almond meal, baking powder, coriander, and salt. Add to the butter mixture, then add in ricotta, milk, apple, and lemon zest. Beat until just mixed.

3. Spread batter in pan and bake for 13 minutes. Remove from oven and press quartered figs into the surface of the cake. Brush with honey, then return to the oven for an additional half-hour or until a toothpick inserted near the center of the cake comes out clean.

4. Allow to cool completely, then remove the sides of the spring-form pan. If desired, top with olive oil or sweetened yogurt.

---

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing or subscribing! As always, the comments are open below. I look forward to chatting with you, and hearing about your favorite ways to optimize fig season. These gems of the fruit world deserve all the love we can give them!