Memories of my mother’s Cajun cooking often flood my mind as a portal to my years growing up in Louisiana. Rather than the main dishes she served at dinner, however, I recall simpler treats: her richly nutty pecan pralines, the blackberry pie she made at my request instead of a birthday cake, and her fig preserves.
My mother loved to preserve figs, transforming the purple-and-green bulbous orbs to caramel-brown delicacies of sweetness. She “put up” figs whenever she found enough fruit to preserve. That was the challenge. We didn’t have a fig tree.
Like a detective with a nose for the telling clue, she would eye neighbors’ yards, her tongue releasing an audible reprimand when she saw what she didn’t want to see, yet loved to see: unattended, unappreciated fig trees. Any of them might be her fig source. As the green figs appeared on a tree, she would watch for its owners’ awareness of the treasure in their yards. Did they visit the tree to follow the figs’ ripening? Were they even aware of the fruit-producing tree?
Why We Wrote This
As he wistfully remembers his mother’s homemade fig preserves, a Cajun-country transplant in Manhattan stumbles on an epiphany. His beloved mom and her jam are gone, but he can still savor the reminiscence.
My mother had learned to preserve figs from her mother, although my mother’s preserves were better – darker, richer, hardier – than my grandmother’s preserves, a fact I never divulged to my grandmother.
The process was simple. She’d wash the whole raw figs and place them in a large pot with a small amount of water. When the figs began to bubble like Vesuvius about to erupt, she would add heaps of sugar. The figs would cook until their tough outer skin softened and some began to burst open to gently ooze their seedy pulp, thickening the mixture into a grainy, molasses-brown syrup, while other figs remained whole, their thick stems still attached. She would spoon the fruit into sterilized jars, cover them loosely with their flat metal tops, and set them out on our screened-in back porch to cool. Hours later, she fitted rubber seals over the jars’ wide mouths, screwed the seals on tightly, and carried them into the toolshed in our garage.
Rows of Mason jars brimming with fig preserves stood on the shelves like broad-shouldered soldiers thrown in among the ragtag reserves of paint buckets. Chest high, on a clean ledge near the front of the shed, they held the place of honor within easy reach.
Whenever the supply in the house ran low, my brothers or I would be sent to retrieve a fresh jar. Our kitchen refrigerator always held a half-empty jar, its canning seal broken by hungry hands.
Glistening in the morning light, the figs accompanied my mother’s crisp, salty bacon and her golden-yolk fried eggs. We would cover steaming, buttered biscuits with the figs’ jeweled radiance and wash them down with strong, hot Cajun coffee milk. If we were really fortunate, the figs would be served with peppery Cajun boudin, the figs’ sugary sweetness quenching the fire of the hot rice sausage like a silky salve.
Although my mother taught her five sons good manners, my brothers and I would still grab the figs by their convenient handle stems with our bare hands, raise them above our lips, lower the juicy fruit into our mouths, bite off the stem at the last second, and hold it up triumphantly for one another to see.
When I moved from Louisiana to New York City, my mother kept me informed of her search for fig trees. “Those college boys next door don’t seem interested in that fig tree,” she would say over the phone. “It needs pruning.”
“Why don’t you ask them for the figs?” I replied, reading the thought she was not ready to utter.
“No, I’ll wait to see what they’ll do.” My mother was not the pushy type, but I imagined her peeking over the fence with a watchful eye.
More progress reports ensued. “The figs are coming out now,” she told me. I felt I should put up a tracking chart in my Manhattan apartment of the figs’ progress.
“The figs are ready,” she said finally. “They’ll go to waste if not picked.”
“Go ask those guys if you can pick them,” I said. Obviously, the college students had other things on their minds.
She did, and the students were surprised she wanted the fruit. “I didn’t take them all,” she told me, “just in case the boys decided to give them a try.” I doubted they would.
I once asked my mother why she had never planted a fig tree in our yard. “I always managed to get enough from other people,” she explained. After a pause, she added, “I also knew it would take so long for a tree to bear fruit.”
I understood. I remembered that when I was 7 years old, she and my father planted pine saplings around our yard. I asked her when there would be pine cones, visions of making Thanksgiving turkey decorations out of the cones dancing in my head.
“It will be a long time,” she replied. “You’ll be in college by then.” I looked at the little saplings and thought how a lifetime would pass before there would be pine cones. The thought of growing up and leaving home made me sad.
But I grew up, moved away. Then, as an adult on a trip home, I noticed that the trees now towered over our house and pine cones lay on the ground forgotten. All those years had gone by, and I had not even noticed.
It turned out those years were like the jars of preserves on the shelf in the old storage room, taken down one by one, emptied greedily, until they were gone. I realized, wistfully, the passing years, like figs, could be preserved, but only in my memories.
