Is it especially sweet or especially ridiculous to be writing of freshness and ripeness a month after the fact, weeks into the season of crispness and brownness and tucking in, with all the fecund effulgence of late summer long decamped to places left behind? Perhaps my desire to do so just reflects how very long overdue we are here at Moving Right Along for a Rapturous Silliness Break. So let's get on with it!
The juicy succulence may be long over, but the joy lingers. That's how joy can work, if you let it.
About a month or so ago, in parts of the world where such things ripen in August and September, the figs and the tomatoes reached their peak. They were glorious. Everyone was blogging about them. I wanted to, too! So I took some pictures. And then things got messy at my house, and I had to step away from their delicious phantoms.
I think it's time to revisit.
Figs do not grow in Massachusetts unless in a hothouse. I grew up in Southern California, though, and they grew quite nicely there. While attending UCLA as an undergraduate, my sister rented an apartment in college which had an enormous fig tree outside, and she would bring us lots of them every time she came home for a visit. I didn't think they were as nice as dried ones when I was nine years old. They so were very green tasting, more obviously fresh vegetation, less obviously the stuff of cookie filling. Nowadays the dried ones, though still lovely, taste very much less entrancing to me and feel like leather on my tongue. Funny, huh?
As long as I have lived here, I have never seen fresh, organically grown figs for sale in Massachusetts. This summer, though, in late August, suddenly my store had tons of them! Several kinds! $3.98 for a box of four or five, possibly as many as eight if they were the tiny ones! Youch! But I still had that 20% discount, so I not only orgied on them every day but even bought 20% more than I otherwise would have.
In my glee, I photographed some of these lovelies for you. First, regard the small but luscious Turkish Brown to the left. Tantalizing, isn't it? That skin, with its own sueded soft duskiness muting its purple feathered markings, that skin feels like washed silk against your lips.
You will not peel that skin. You will break that skin with your teeth, biting into it like an apple, but it will yield almost effortlessly, like no good apple ever would, and it will taste like sugar, and the inside will be the soul of fruit, the tiny crunchy seeds entangled in their rosy, nectarous trappings, juicy and almost plushy. You will not be able to stop. You will eat them all unless there is someone there to stop you and make you share.
Another tempter is the Calmyrna fig. Regard its plump golden green shape. Don't you want to bite it? Its skin is even silkier and more yielding than the Turkish Brown, and its taste even fresher. And it's bigger, so there's more in every fruit, though fewer fruits in every container. There is more decadent, dripping pink sweetness inside. Your tongue will go mad.
You know, your tongue will go mad next summer, when the figs return and it's your turn to gorge upon them. You can feast like I did, all alone with no one looking but your camera, or perhaps you are better and less greedy than I and will find someone to share them with or a wondrous new way to serve them.
As I have written in the comments of other bloggers who were kind enough to share recipes for preparing and combinations of things to present with these delightful fruits, this last summer here was so very dark and wet and cold that there just wasn't all that much great fruit about. Most of it came from far away and was not organically grown, and what was organically grown was unbelievably expensive. Local blueberries for $6 a pint. Washington cherries for $8 and more a pound, depending on the variety.
I am a stickler for organically grown produce, but not because organically grown fruit tastes better. It often does, but not always. It especially does not when the stuff being grown is the same monotonous set of hybrids conventional growers have developed laudably enough for disease resistance, less laudably for long shelf life and ease of shipping over enormous distances at the cost of flavor and texture, and especially not when the stuff never really ripens anyway, because unless it's flown to its various markets at absurd expense (both economic and environmental), all produce grown for faraway markets, conventional or organic, is picked underripe so it won't rot before it gets to stores in other states, sometimes even other countries on other continents. No, I stick with the organics even when they're as boring as the conventionally grown can be mostly because persistent pesticides and chemical fertilizers are bad for us and bad for the planet.
I can bore you to death on this subject, on how it doesn't have to cost substantially more to grow food without these toxins and what they do to birds and other wildlife, how pesticides (some made by companies that also make cancer drugs) have been linked with cancer (including breast cancer -- oh, and by the way, happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month), and how much poorer our lives are becoming because we all keep choosing what's easy and cheap instead of considering consequences of every dollar we spend...but I won't. Not today. Today we are talking about the glory of the food we have. Or have had, recently. And my point in mentioning my insistence on only bringing organically grown produce into my own home has been to further explain why I didn't find all that much great produce around this last season. And the reason I feel the need to mention that is to rationalize the urgency of my greed for what I did find.
Figs are lovely in salads with chevre. Figs are lovely on a plate with other nummy nummy sliced things. Figs are lovely in ice cream, especially the black mission fig goat milk ice cream by Laloo I sampled this summer that had me swooning and moaning with every spoonful. But you know where else figs are lovely?
In your mouth. Unadulterated. Devoured right now because you are here right now and have them and want them right now.
Blah, blah, blah, crème fraîche, blah, blah, blah, balsamic reduction, blah, blah. Gimme that juice. Gimme that juice now.
Ah.
You know what else we have to look back upon fondly and forward to with lust next summer? Tomatoes.
Now, as you know, I have been experimenting -- sometimes a little inadvertently -- with the range of tomatoes I grow myself out on the balcony. The most important discovery I made this summer, though, is not that homegrown tomatoes (organically homegrown, of course) are way more fantastic than even the most unabashedly sloppy wet orgasmic farm- or store-bought locally and organically grown tomato. This I knew. Everyone who's ever home-grown something knows of this phenomenon. No, this summer I learned something else: Flavorwise, size matters.
Check this monster out! It's nearly as big as my face! (Er -- it was. It died the death of a thousand -- well, okay, maybe twenty -- cuts.) It's a locally and organically grown, heirloom variety, slicing tomato.
Every year, I look forward to these. Every year, they are here for but a few weeks, in a stunning array of opulent colors -- gold, crimson, purple, tigered green. Their sizes range from plum to, uh, face. They are magnificent. Because they are local, they get to the store ripe as possible, ready to eat right now, today, and you'd better not wait. They improve every sandwich. They are salads in and of themselves, no dressing needed, but when you do pop them into or onto salads and omelets and whatever else you like, you are not sorry. And when you bite into them, laying slices upon your tongue so juicy they practically fall apart before they reach your mouth, so beautiful you're half-tempted to throw them on the flatbed scanner instead just to record the stained glass glory that is each tomato's inner beauty, so tangy-salty-sweet they sing the song into your senses of all that is good about breathing, when you bite into them, your theology clarifies and your very toes, even phantom toes, wiggle with joy for ever having existed.
Except...not this one. This one was just...just...okay.
Not just my tiny organic tomatoes, but all tiny organic tomatoes I purchased at stores and farms before and after my own crop (and frankly even while they were still coming fairly regularly because my crop was terribly small as the amount of rain we got this summer kept the bees from flying and the plants from fruiting) were SO much better than this tomato. Every roma tomato I bought was better than this one. Even every other heirloom tomato I bought was better than this one. They were all also significantly smaller.
So, my conclusion? Breeding matters. Environment matters. But also? I hate to say it, but...size matters.
Don't get me wrong; big is fun. Look how fun! When was the last time you had as much fun with a tomato as I had photographing this one with my true love's really quite entrancingly Holga-like (though you can't see it here) Pentax Optio? And big is versatile. Sure, you can split grape tomatoes for sandwiches, etc., but the skins get tedious. Nevertheless, for pure, flavorful delight, I'm afraid I've made up my mind. Ironic as it may sound, as far as tomatoes go, less is more.
Uh, less size is more flavor. Don't think for a moment this has anything to do with quantity. If you get yourself some good ones, you definitely want to eat -- and yes, yes, share (sigh) -- as many as you can.
If you are like me, you might actually overestimate the number of tomatoes you can gobble up -- and yes, yes, share if you have to can. That's okay. When the tomatoes start to get a little too soft to be enjoyed raw, you can either chop them up and sauté them into things you are cooking, throw them in the blender and make gazpacho or amazing fresh enchilada sauce you perk up with a chopped bunch of cilantro and a little finely minced serrano or jalapeño, or put them in Ziploc®-type baggies and then put the baggies in the freezer. This last will preserve all the flavor of summer, and then when you're cooking your hearty soups and stews in the depths of darkest winter, you can just throw them in whole, still frozen (but without the bag, of course), and let them dissolve into the pot, where they will add all kinds of lovely nutrients which this method of storage preserves effortlessly, plus worlds of taste and richness -- and, I have to believe, joy.
This isn't merely a 'post' - it's an epic poem - it's a rhapsody-in-red - a beautiful ode to the tomato. ('Figs' figure, too:0) I'm positively drooling.
Posted by: Cathy | October 06, 2006 at 08:28 PM
Glad you enjoyed it, Cathy!
Posted by: Sara | October 07, 2006 at 03:56 PM
WHERE CAN I BUY SOME FRESH FIGS?
Posted by: JOE DEL SESTO | November 10, 2008 at 01:05 PM
I don't know, Joe, but if you live in New England as I do, you're probably out of luck 'til next August.
I'd ask at your local specialty market. Good luck.
Posted by: Sara | November 10, 2008 at 01:13 PM