Figs, or the Fruit That Refuses to Travel

There is a fig tree growing out of a wall near where I am staying, and I mean that almost literally: it has forced its roots into a crack in the old stone, perhaps three metres up, and hangs there sideways over the lane, unwatered, unplanted, unasked for, dropping ripe figs onto the pavement below where they burst into small purple catastrophes that the wasps attend to with tremendous enthusiasm. Nobody owns this tree. Nobody tends it. It is, by the standards of the fruit I usually write about — the coddled apricot, the fussy cherry — an absolute vandal, thriving in conditions that would kill a more respectable plant, and producing, twice a year, some of the best fruit in the world for precisely no one and everyone.

This is the first thing to understand about the fig: it grows like a weed across the whole Mediterranean and well beyond it, in the poorest soil, out of walls and ruins and roadsides, with a stubborn peasant hardiness that sits oddly against the fruit's reputation as a luxury. The tree asks for nothing. The fruit, in exchange, gives you one of the most demanding deadlines in all of eating.

Because here is the fig's central paradox, the thing that governs its entire place in human culture. The tree could not be tougher; the fruit could not be more fragile. A perfectly ripe fig — heavy, slightly split at the base, the skin gone soft and beginning to wrinkle, a bead of syrup weeping from the eye — is at the absolute peak of its short life for a matter of hours, and it cannot be moved. It will not travel. It bruises if you look at it, ferments if you wait, and turns to mush in the bottom of any bag or box you try to carry it home in. This is why the figs you buy in a supermarket in a northern country are a different and lesser thing entirely: picked hard and underripe so they can survive the journey, they arrive looking like figs and tasting like slightly sweet packing foam, having never been allowed the final days on the tree that are the entire point of the fruit.

To eat a real fig, then, you have to go to the tree. There is genuinely no other way. Of all the "you had to be there" fruits I have written about across this long summer — the apricot, the cherry, the first tomato — the fig is the most absolute case. The apricot at least tries to reach you. The fig doesn't bother. It ripens where it grows and it is eaten where it ripens, warm from the sun, standing under the tree that made it, or it is not properly eaten at all.

The tree is one of the oldest companions of human civilisation, older even than the grain fields. There is archaeological evidence from the Jordan Valley of figs being cultivated some eleven thousand years ago — possibly the first domesticated plant of any kind, predating wheat and barley — because the fig had a quality early farmers prized: a branch cut and stuck in the ground will simply grow into a new tree, no seed or science required. The fig appears in the earliest layers of nearly every Mediterranean and Near Eastern culture. It is the leaf that clothes Adam and Eve; it is under a fig tree that the Buddha reaches enlightenment (a related species); it is sacred to the Romans, who held that the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus in the shade of one. Figs were pressed into cakes for Greek athletes and Roman soldiers, dried and strung and carried as some of the earliest portable, storable, energy-dense food. Pliny wrote about the different varieties with the enthusiasm of a man who clearly had favourites.

That length of companionship is written into how completely the fig has spread. It followed human migration out of its Near Eastern homeland into every corner of the Mediterranean, and then, with later empires and emigrants, far beyond it — to California, to Australia, to South Africa, anywhere the climate was dry and warm enough to suit it. There is a particular poignancy in the fig trees that immigrants carried, as cuttings, to new countries: Italian and Greek and Portuguese and Middle Eastern families planting a fig in the backyard of a house in Melbourne or New Jersey or London, wrapping it in winter against a cold it was never built for, coaxing a piece of the old country's summer out of unpromising northern ground. A backyard fig tree, in a lot of the world's diaspora neighbourhoods, is a small green flag of where a family came from.

The fig's refusal to travel has shaped, as these constraints always do, an entire second life for the fruit — the preserved life, which is how most of the world has actually eaten figs for most of history. Since the ripe fig cannot be moved or kept, the fig that feeds the winter is the dried one, and the drying of figs is a serious agricultural tradition across the whole belt from Portugal to Turkey and beyond.

In Turkey — which grows and dries more figs than anywhere on earth, the groves of the Aydın province around the Büyük Menderes valley being the great heartland — the fruit is laid out in the fierce sun until it collapses into something chewy, intensely sweet, and keepable for a year. In Calabria and Puglia, in the Italian south, dried figs are split, sometimes stuffed with a walnut or an almond, sometimes baked, sometimes dipped in chocolate, and strung up or packed away for winter; crocette, they're called in some places, figs folded into little crosses around their nut. Across Greece, Spain, and North Africa the same logic runs: the glut of September, which cannot possibly be eaten fresh, is captured by the sun and released across the cold months, when a handful of dried figs and some nuts was for centuries a staple winter sweetness in places that had little other. The dried fig is the fig made possible to trade, to store, to survive on — the answer to the fresh fig's impossible fragility.

But when the fruit is fresh and in season, the cooking of it tends toward a single, almost universal insight: the fig wants salt, fat, and savour against its honeyed softness. The great pairing, known all around the Mediterranean and now well beyond it, is fig with cured pork — fresh figs draped with prosciutto or jamón, the sweet syrupy flesh against the salt-and-fat of the ham, a combination that works for exactly the same reason the watermelon wants its feta: sweetness thrown into relief by salt is one of the oldest and most reliable pleasures of the table. Figs are roasted and served alongside duck or lamb; they are split and grilled and set beside soft cheeses — a fresh goat's cheese, a creamy blue, a slab of gorgonzola whose sharp funk answers the fig's perfumed sweetness. They are turned, at the end of the season, into jam — fig jam being one of the great preserves, dense and seedy and dark, the thing you spread on bread through the winter and serve on the cheeseboard beside the very cheeses the fresh fruit loved.

And the very best of them, of course, are eaten with nothing at all. A ripe fig, warm from the tree, split open with your thumbs to show the astonishing interior — that dense mass of pink and gold and a hundred tiny seeds, structurally somewhere between a fruit and a flower, which is more or less exactly what a fig botanically is — needs no preparation, no pairing, no plate. It needs a person standing under a tree in September, and the good sense to eat it right there.

I keep going back to look at that fig tree in the wall, the vandal, the one nobody planted. It has no business being as good as it is. It gets no care and it produces, twice a year, fruit that a careful orchardist would be proud of — the small early crop in June, the breba, and then the main crop now, in the late summer and early autumn, heavy and splitting and dropping faster than the wasps and I together can deal with. There is something in that ungoverned abundance that feels like the deep character of the fruit: the fig has been giving itself away, freely and locally and impossibly perishably, for eleven thousand years, and it has never once agreed to be tamed into something that ships well.

Which means the fig keeps a small piece of the old bargain that most of our food has quietly abandoned. Nearly everything else can now be had anywhere, any month, flown in and cold-stored and standardised into year-round availability. The perfect fresh fig cannot, and never will be. It stays stubbornly where it grows and rots if you try to make it leave, and in doing so it holds the line for a nearly vanished idea — that some things are worth having only in one place, at one brief time, and that the way to have them is to go there, and be there, while they last.

The tree in the wall doesn't know any of this. It is just dropping figs onto the pavement, as it has every September for who knows how long, for whoever happens to be standing underneath. This September, some of the time, that is me. I intend to keep standing there until the crop is done.