We've always loved Greenville, Mississippi, native and Southern writer Julia Reed for her wit and style. She's a contributing editor at Vogue and has written for this magazine for more than 10 years. But we've also learned along the way that Reed has a way with cooking and entertaining. She takes tried-and-true Southern recipes -- those she learned from her mother, neighbors, friends, and culinary icons -- and gives them a fresh spin, presenting them in such a way that we all wonder why we haven't been canning and preserving, mixing potent cocktails, and generally getting into the kitchen every evening. With her new cookbook, Reed culls recipes and essays from columns she wrote for The New York Times and adds a few notes and tweaks to inspire us all anew. This excerpt, from the chapter "Giving a Fig," and the recipes that follow remind us of the many reasons there are to love this Southern delicacy.
My friend George Peterkin Jr. is fig obsessed. He lives in Houston and travels all the time, but from mid-June until mid-July when the figs are ripe on his trees, he refuses to leave them. He can't. For one thing, somebody has to shoot the squirrels when they get after them. (The birds are less of a problem. A pair of territorial mockingbirds keep the other birds away, and George estimates that they can only eat "maximum five percent" of the crop by themselves. "I love those mockingbirds," he says.) Also, the more than fifty people on his fig list would be extremely upset.
George has 14 fig trees -- 13 Celeste and one LSU Purple, a new variety, developed by Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, that George does not recommend. ("They have no taste.") These trees put out a lot of figs; he spends as much as two or three hours a day picking them, collecting the good ones in baskets and tossing the ones that have "bloomed out" (the fig's fruit is also its flower) into his neighbor's yard. The bulk of them are then divided into brown paper bags that are picked up by or delivered to the lucky folks on the list, a diverse group that includes former Republican Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary James Baker, and, until he died, the former Democratic Senator, candidate for vice president, and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen.
George proudly says he is a "third generation fig man." His figs are so important to him that when he married his wife, Nancy, she had to agree to two things: she would never check a suitcase when they traveled, and she would always peel his breakfast figs. ("I've been peeling them for 38 years," she confirms, with something slightly less than a smile.) I have to agree with George that the breakfast figs, served with sugar and heavy cream, are superior when they are peeled, but I'll eat them pretty much any way I can. And when visiting Nancy and George during the season, there is ample opportunity. The last time I went for a weekend of heavy fig tasting, we had figs wrapped in prosciutto; we had fig preserves on toast; we even had fig daiquiris. The flavor of the figs in the daiquiris was a bit overwhelmed by the lime juice and the rum, but the color, a pale pink, was gorgeous, and George pronounced them "just the thing for a first drink."
George's devotion to figs is touching, but he is not alone. When the legendary newspaper editor Hodding Carter Jr. died, his son Philip wrote a tribute to him that included a list of the things he loved. Among them were "good whiskey, fresh figs, raw oysters." The Greek poet Alexis of Thurii referred to the fig as "that god-given inheritance of our mother country," and the "darling of my heart." According to The Horizon Cookbook and Illustrated History of Eating and Drinking through the Ages, the ancients attributed "magical, medicinal powers" to the fig; Athenaeus called it "the most useful of all the fruits which grow on trees." The Egyptians buried whole baskets of them with their dead. They valued them for their taste, of course, but also their mild laxative qualities -- they believed that most illnesses had their source in the alimentary canal and were forever fasting and generally cleaning out their digestive systems.
