When we bought our house in Philadelphia’s Mt. Airy neighborhood in 2019, the first thing I planted was a hardy fig tree right outside my kitchen window against the sun drenched stone wall. In 4 years since, that tree has flourished until I can barely keep up with its production. I make fig kuchen, fig tarte tatin, and my copycat version of Contramar’s fig tart, but mostly I make whole fig preserves, which are embedded in my DNA.
The most loved preserve that my mother and grandmother, as well as many other women in my rural Mississippi community, made were whole fig preserves. As a girl I remember a neighbor dropping off a shoebox of figs, and how they immediately took priority. Juicy figs quickly weep and ferment in the sultry summer heat so preservation is the only way to prolong our enjoyment of them. My mother rinsed, trimmed, and nestled the figs in her widest pot with sugar and paper-thin slices of lemon. Then they were covered and left to give up their juices before a long, lazy simmer transformed them into the oldest candy in the world.
Fig preserves were not designed with sliced bread in mind. They are spooned over hot biscuits, which soak up their thick syrup as the tart whiff of buttermilk steam hangs in the air. We ate them for breakfast, as a quick weeknight dessert after dinner, or straight off a spoon as an afternoon pick me up. Though these whole fig preserves have never been something you could buy at the store, they have long existed as a domestic luxury of common people that are grown, given, cooked, and celebrated outside the market.
In fact, as popular as figs, and fig preserves specifically, are across the south, they have long resisted commercialization. There were many attempts to grow fig orchards in South Texas, where there once was an extensive industry of canned figs and fig preserves, but figs perform much better and live much longer when planted singularly, just like mine, right next to the house.
From Virginia to Texas, fig trees flourish in protected locales. Outside my backdoor in Hillsborough, North Carolina, a fig tree thrived against the warm cinder block wall of my preserving kitchen. One grew against my grandparents’ brick ranch in north Mississippi’s hillcountry. You can enjoy coffee next to one off the front porch of Durham’s Foster’s Market. Rent an old beach cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks next August, and you can pilfer salt tolerant figs en route to the beach since many old beach cottages have a fig tree planted against their south facing wall. At fish markets on Ocracoke Island, you’ll find not only fish but slices of fig cake for sale. If you’ve eaten ice cream at the famed Maple View Farm in Hillsborough, NC, perhaps you noticed the big fig bush growing at the back of the building. If you should drive around South Louisiana eating boudin and cracklings (which you absolutely should), pay attention to the fig trees that stand outside many of the meat shops and provide a source of figs for the sweet dough pies and preserves that are sold alongside the sausages. Drive out to rural northern Calhoun County, Mississippi, along the Skuna River, and you’ll find fig trees that mark the existence of the old gardens long after my ancestors’ farmhouses have rotted into the ground.
When I ran my preserving business, I could never make enough fig preserves and my award-winning twist on the old classic, Bourbon’d Figs. Only a fraction of the figs I processed came from my own garden. Some I plucked from the trees of friends and neighbors in exchange for a few jars of preserves. Others I bought from Hazeline and Dalton Zachary, who sold fruits and vegetables from their small Alamance County farm at the Carrboro Farmer’s Market for more than 30 years. Ms. Hazeline, a wiry woman in her late seventies at the time, clapped her hands in delight as she told me she climbs onto the hood of her pickup so she can reach the highest branches. Her son tells her to wait for him to come help her. He won’t come every day though, and “the figs don’t wait,” she said. I would always buy all she could pick. “Have you ever seen any fig preserves left on the shelf in the winter time? Cause I haven’t,” she would say.
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