A fig in February
Here it is February 43rd, so March must be waking up, eating breakfast, getting ready for work. Please, March, don’t call in sick.
In other good news, last week while Yukon was in town, the fig bush in my living room made a fig! First one ever. The three-year old plant spends summers on the deck, winters inside. I’m new to figs, and I didn’t know when fig plants figged. I figured warmer weather. This plant is a dwarf variety and apparently a winter figger, or maybe the figging has just begun.
I grew up seven hours south of here, and a large fig bush had taken over half the front of my friend’s house. I went there for sports activities, to skirt the edge of trouble, and for figs.
As an adult, I’ve learned it’s difficult to find fresh figs at a market because fig farmers are rare, and the fruits are delicate. They should be consumed soon after picking. However, they are excellent when dehydrated. They’re like a vitamin pill packed with potassium and calcium for your bones, vitamins C and A for your alphabet collection, and iron for making hemoglobin. Don’t forget fiber which facilitates digestion. Roman historian Pliny the Rascal went ballyhoo about the restorative powers of figs, and he should know. Those are all good things, so eat your figs.
Isn’t it clever of prebiotics to sometimes look like garlic and sometimes like figs.
In ancient Sumeria, figs were eaten long before grains were domesticated. As folks settled into communities, figs were as common as camels – eaten as snacks, baked into breads, blended into beers and dehydrated for later. Rich and poor alike from India to Turkey had plenty of figs. They sweetened bitter foods, and ancient grandmothers instinctively knew the health benefits of figs.
To briefly insert science into this history, it should be noted a fig is not a fruit but a syconium. Maybe you knew that. It’s okay if you didn’t. A syconium is a fleshy sac containing fig flowers. That’s right – the flowers are inside the fig. Other members of the mulberry family, to which figs belong, also bear syconia. I had no idea.
Maybe the flowers contribute to the sweetness of figs which, of course, influenced the spread of figs across the northern side of the Mediterranean, also to Algeria and Egypt on the southern side where figs have been as vital to their economies as olives.
Figs prefer hot, dry climates. They might not survive sustained temperatures in low 20s Fahrenheit or below. The recent visit of Yukon to our area comes to mind. Perhaps I should keep my dwarf specimen in its pot and shuttle it back and forth from deck to living room as temperatures dictate, but a healthy, established outdoor plant could live for a century and grow 50 feet tall. Think about how many figs you could get from a fig bush half as big as a house!
That’s the story of figs, but here is the story of Fig Newtons®. Traditionally, physicians recommended adding biscuits and fruit to the diet to aid digestion. In late 19th century, Charles Roser of Philadelphia liked figs so much, he built a machine which enveloped a dab of fig paste in pastry dough. He sold his fig biscuits around town, and they were a hit. The Kennedy Biscuit Company of Cambridgeport, Mass., bought his recipe, and in 1891, began mass-producing the tasty tidbits. And in what town did they make fig biscuits? Newton, Mass.
Shortly after, that company merged with the New York Biscuit Company and became Nabisco. The town of Newton and the Nabisco Company staged a centennial anniversary of the famous biscuit in 1991, and the featured entertainer was Juice Newton.
It slipped by me this year, but January 16 is National Fig Newton Day in case you need a reason for a party.