The last couple of posts have been on stuff to do with plums, lots of plums (and there’s still jam and tart to come…), but I wouldn’t want you to go away with the idea that this blog is all, and only, about plums these days. Of course it’s not. And of course this time of year, the end of the summer and beginning of autumn, is famously the most abundant time ofyear for all sorts of fruit and veg – not to mention wild mushrooms and game.
While it may not be a
common feature of the traditional English harvest festival, one of the
conspicuous highlights of this time of year round here – here being Dalston,
with its many Turkish shops, - is the abundance, and perfect plump ripeness, of
fresh figs. They are, it’s true,
available through much of the rest of the year too, these days, but between now
and Christmas is the only time they are ever worth buying, and right about this
time, from mid August and throughout September, is best of all. And one of the things that reminds me to be thankful that we live in Dalston,
with its many Turkish shops, in any one of which you can buy four figs for a pound. A rather better deal than the in no way superior looking figs I came across in Fortnum and Masons the other day - having an hour to kill in Piccadilly - being sold for a pound fifty a piece (or four for six pounds).
A perfectly ripe fig
is of course, a beautiful and lusciously tempting thing, with its velveteen
soft, purple skin and yielding, crimson insides. It’s easy to see why it has such strong associations with
decadence and, mainly, sex.
Although whether or not the experience of eating one is ever actually
erotic, I’m not so sure. Speaking
for myself, of course. Clearly one
of the defining features of eroticism is that every individual finds it where
they will, and there’s no point trying to say they’re wrong. If a fig turns you on – or wearing a
ball gag or nappy for that matter – who am I to argue that there’s nothing
erotic about it. Speaking for
myself, as I am, I’d say pretty much anything loses its erotic potential once
that relentless enthusiast for all things erotic - and, particularly, symbolic
– DH
Lawrence has had done with it…
Like plums, figs are
used as direct slang for intimate body parts. Unlike plums, or anything else I can think of, for that
matter, figs have been commonly used as slang for both male and female parts,
which is a bit weird but nowhere near as weird as the sex life of the fig
itself – if one can use the term sex life for the reproductive mechanism of a
plant. The fruit is in fact an
inverted flower, which depends on a particular kind of wasp (of which there is
a matching species for each distinct species of fig, and for whom the
dependency is mutual) to pollinate it, and within which the female wasp, having
pollinated it and laid her eggs within it, dies, and is consumed. It seems to me that once you know that,
any erotic charge that the fig still holds is of a pretty dark, one might say Cronenbergian hue…
Nevertheless, and
putting to the back of your mind that every time you eat a fig you’re eating a
dead wasp mother (but don’t worry, the lifecycles
of the two organisms are, thankfully, synchronised in such a way that there
will be no wasp larvae present in any edible fig), a perfectly ripe fig is
not only a beautiful and tempting thing, but a sublimely delicious one. Eat them on their own, with a drizzle
of honey or maple syrup. Or, as I
did recently, make a salad of quartered figs, wedges of peach and shredded
parma or Serrano ham. Again, a
light drizzle of maple syrup to dress it, and you have yourself a lusciously
decadent and delicious – if not downright erotic – lunch , or better still,
breakfast, dish.
No comments:
Post a Comment