AMB Cote d'Azur

Here, in the south of France, vegetables, generally speaking, do not do well: as Cole Porter put it, it’s too darn hot. Fruit, however, is another matter, though here again the sod’s law of the glut syndrome applies.  Fortunately we have enough non-growing friends to take up at least some of the slack. We have regular abundant crops of what are laughingly called dessert grapes, whose principle seems to be to make up for the lack of flavour with a superabundance of pips. In the juicer, to a sound so like machine-gun fire that the uninformed run for cover, they have proved to make a useful base for all kinds of preserves, from the herb jellies - mint, sage, tarragon and so on - that the British enjoy and the French puzzle over, to the spreadable jellies that the French enjoy and the British regard as some kind of inferior jam. 

This year’s glut has been figs, the fine, fat purple kind. They are absolutely delicious but far too many to be coped with by offering them around. They can be dried in the sun and successfully preserved in alcohol, but there are limits to just how many of these delicacies one wants to stock. So we’ve been going through the cookery books in search of recipes.

This research established a curious thing that we probably really knew but had not reflected upon: British cooks are not much into cooking fruit, beyond jam-making and stewing for desserts. This struck us as odd because the 16^th century British cuisine used fruits in main course recipes quite extensively. Quite why this should have died out is unclear. Although there are now plenty of appropriate French recipes, these seem to have been relatively recent, reflecting North African and eastern Mediterranean cookery influences. Fruit in main courses are not much to be found among the recipes of post-war pioneering cookery writers like Elizabeth David.

Our trawl through the recipe files has happily netted a surprisingly large harvest of interesting uses of figs. They were certainly easier to spot than the figs themselves. Daily pickings to keep up with the output have established how easy it is to miss the ripe fruit behind the abundant foliage. Missing them imposes penalties: unpicked ripe fruits simply splatter themselves over the surrounding paving, making a sticky underfoot morass that is rather like treading on endless chewing gum.

The concealing foliage does, however, offer an interesting insight into such matters as biblical reportage and classical sculpture. Fig-leaves are enormous. One can only imagine that the artists of Rome and Florence had either never seen a fig tree or that they thought it more titillating to hide their subjects’ sexual characteristics behind skimpy little leaves. It would not, in fact, take an awful lot of fig-leaves to provide suits capable of withstanding the harshest winters in the Garden of Eden, always supposing the weather there was not the perpetual summer depicted in classical art.

This is not a cookery column, so I won't attempt to describe the myriad ways in which figs can enhance dishes of almost every kind. What is worth adding, for the benefit of people who might worry about all those tiny pips, is that cooking softens them.  Their presence is usually to be felt, however, though not in any dentally-threatening way.  Recipes including cooked figs have a just barely discernible crunchiness.  If you think of picnics on the beach when only a tiny amount of sand has got into the sandwiches, you’ll get the idea:  it’s faintly disconcerting but not at all unpleasant.

If you fancy experimenting with cooked figs, an easy start is simply to make cross cuts in the stem end of each fruit, pour in and over a mixture of runny honey and lemon juice, scatter a few fresh thyme leaves on top and bake them in the oven for 20 minutes at 200°C. If that doesn’t encourage you to try something more elaborate, you’d better just wait for the next glut of some other fruit.

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