Food
Michele Roberts compares women to figs
Published 24 November 2003
Like figs, women know how to rot and die, and how to ripen again
Colette's house near Saint-Tropez was surrounded by plantations of fig trees. Even back in 1933 the holiday paradise was beginning to be invaded by too many tourists. She was not a tourist, oh no. In August that year she wrote to her friend Helene Picard: "Saint-Tropez and Saint-Maxime have become more and more Montmartre and Montparnasse. If I go into town, I'm stopped by all the people whom I avoid in Paris - dressed up as Mexican planters, jugglers, cabin boys - no, no, and no. I prefer the coast road at 6am, drenched in dew, and flanked by the sea on one side and fig trees on the other . . ."
Colette did not romanticise nature. Her eye was precise, particularly when it came to assessing fruit and veg. She wrote to Madame Leopold Marchand in 1930: "One must live here to appreciate the four colours of figs: the green with yellow pulp; the white with red pulp; the black with red pulp; and the violet, or rather the mauve, with pink pulp, all with such delicate skin."
Figs used to be a Christmas luxury for us. Though we sang about figgy puddings in the carol, we did not eat them. Christmas pudding had every sort of dried fruit in it save figs. They came in exotic round cardboard boxes, to be enjoyed as a dessert along with walnuts, almonds and tangerines, after the turkey and pud. You prised apart the pressed contents, which were skinned, beige-coloured, seed-filled. You remembered, in Victorian novels, the medicinal syrup of figs, taken to relieve constipation. Was it in the 1970s that fresh ripe figs began appearing in markets and greengrocers' shops?
Elizabeth David, in Mediterranean Food, spoke the obvious truth: a good fig does not need to be messed about with, but should be eaten raw in as large a quantity as you wish. If you must, you can quarter figs, sprinkle them with orange juice, pile them in a plain white dish, and admire them for ten seconds before falling upon them. Her recipe for figgy pudding involves baking the dried fruit with rice, sugar and milk. She suggests, if you have hard, green, unripe fruit that you don't want to put on the compost heap, that you boil them in sugar syrup to make a sort of jam. Or you can put them around the duck you plan to roast. I once saw a recipe for halved fennel stuffed with chopped figs and mint. No thanks. I shall stick to the ripe raw ones.
D H Lawrence wrote well about fruit. I prefer his poetry to his novels; he waxes wonderfully about sensual pleasures in his loose-limbed free verse. When it comes to figs, he surpasses himself. Let's begin with his poem called "Bare Fig Trees":
Fig trees, weird fig trees
Made of thick smooth silver,
Made of sweet, untarnished silver in the sea-southern air . . .
Great, complicated, nude fig-tree, stemless flower-mesh,
Flowerily naked in flesh, and giving off hues of life.
When he describes the fruit itself, in "Figs", he really takes off:
The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.
But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.
As someone who gets ticked off for daring to employ adjectives at all, I salute a writer who revels in using six in a row. He gets even better: "The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part . . ./The fissure, the yoni,/The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre." Being Lawrence, he then starts to worry. Ripe figs won't keep, and women these days are bursting out into self-assertion like ripe figs, so won't women just rot and die?
Don't worry, Bert: women can think in cycles, just like figs do, if we need to. We know how to rot and die, and also how to ripen, again and again.
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