FOOD FRIDAY: Sweet success
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 172
FOOD FRIDAY DEP'T.
FOOD FRIDAY: The Figs Are Ripening
FOR A LONG time, I've thought about what it would be like to have a fruit tree. I don't spend a lot of time wanting things I don't have, because once it starts, when would it ever stop? But one can't help being aware of the shapes life hasn't taken, and the idea of having a fruit tree carries with it a certain set of other premises: some patch of ground for the fruit tree to have grown in; a house from which one might walk out to pick the fruit; the sense of material stability and continuity in a place that would keep one returning to one's own backyard fruit tree, year after year, possibly even into a leisurely and securely funded retirement. It would suggest having a less slapdash and provisional place upon the earth.
It would also, most likely, mean having to mow a lawn, maybe even having to drive around in a car. It would mean having to deal with the actual fruit, arriving all at once in quantities beyond what a single household could want or use. When we lived in Beijing, a friend of mine had an old courtyard house, with a big tree dropping jujubes in the court. Factually, I would despise having to clean up jujubes off the pavement. Yet the idea of the tree—standing there, enclosed by the walls of home, getting a little bit taller and thicker by the years—stuck in my mind.
That's not in any way how I ended up living. I once persuaded a potted orange tree—a stick of orangewood, really—to flower and then put out one little green peppercorn-like thing that might have been meant, in better hands, to grow into an orange, before the whole thing died. Still, not long after we moved uptown a few years ago, the community garden around the corner was selling plants, and for five bucks they had a fig cutting in a pot.
I bought it strictly to be a houseplant that I might not immediately manage to kill. I like figs, but I also read a lot of articles about how every time you eat a fig, you're consuming the tiny corpse of a fig wasp that crawled inside the fig flower structure to pollinate it and then died. This didn't put me off figs at all; it did, however, leave me with the notion that coaxing fruit out of a fig plant required a degree of effort and harmony with nature far beyond what I could provide. There weren't even any fig wasps in Manhattan, I was sure—though I was aware, too, vaguely, that Italian immigrants had laboriously established fig trees around the city, babying them through the New York winters. Whatever they'd done to get them to fruit must certainly have been beyond my abilities.
I put the fig plant out on the table on the balcony in the summer and brought it back indoors in the winter. When its leaves turned blotchy and yellow and started falling off, I realized it was just being deciduous, sliding into some partial synchrony with the rhythms of nature. Only partial though, because two Februaries ago, while it was sitting atop the through-the-wall air conditioner in the bedroom, I realized there was a small green fig sprouting from it.
Obviously, in retrospect, there are plenty of kinds of fig trees that are parthenocarpic; a fruit doesn't get to be a worldwide commodity by being fussy about pollinators. Very slowly, that lone fig grew, and I plucked it and ate it, and it didn't taste like much. Out on the balcony, in the summer, a second one followed and ripened into real sweetness.
This past winter, the fig dropped its leaves even more aggressively than before. By spring, it was almost entirely bare, and it could have passed for moribund. I looked up how to repot plants, calculated the recommended not-too-much-larger size to use, and then discovered that nobody was selling pots with that kind of meticulous size grading. I got a much larger pot instead, along with a big bag of potting soil, and did a jumbo repotting job.
For a while, the plant stayed puny. Then it started putting out new leaves. It had been lopsided to begin with—a single leaning length of wood—and the new growth on top would have made it tippy if there hadn't been so much ballast in the pot. I rotated the new leaves away from the sun, and the fig obliged by sending out a whole new shoot in the opposite direction. Not only had I failed to kill it, I had convinced it to grow.
One day I noticed a fig coming in on the older shoot. Then I found another. As those very, very gradually grew fatter through the summer months, I spotted a third little one in among the broad, overlapping leaves. And a fourth! The first one got dark and ripe and I collected it. It tasted as good as a fig you would go out and buy. Now the brand-new shoot had a baby fig of its very own. Five figs!
By the time the second fig had softened and started to droop under its own weight, ready to be eaten, there were two more figs on the new shoot—no, wait, there by the leaf buds was a tiny green nub, too round to be a leaf—three! I had to do arithmetic on my plant: I ate one fig, leaving four figs, but then I ate another fig, leaving six figs, so the count was up to eight figs for the season. That's where it stands now, with even the smallest figs approaching the size of a real fruit, and with fig No. 3 on a plate on the counter, waiting to be ritually divided among the household. It's a harvest. I have no idea where the plant is going to fit inside the apartment when winter comes.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 25, 2025
★★ People hurried around in the morning streets between showers, which kept coming. The vestibule was so humid it was hard to tell if the morning paper had briefly sat out on the stoop in the rain before some passing neighbor rescued it, or if the delivery person had just dropped it indoors and it had gone crinkly and soft in the ambient damp anyway. There was a break in the sessions of rain that looked long enough to make it over to Broadway for groceries, but it was also possible to skip the walk and just go to the neighborhood market. What looked at first glance like one gray-and-silver cloud mass over the afternoon was really a tattered sheet of plain gray racing along far below a separate formation of high, bright clouds. Airplanes raced in and out of view, their forms arrestingly sharp in the clear space between the churning layers. Robins thronged the lawn on the Great Hill. Some enterprising other yellow flower reared up on a single, weedy spear-leafed stem above the withered sepia remains of the black-eyed Susans.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!
Tom Scocca
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from British Everyday Cookery, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1910 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
POTTED CHEESE FOR SANDWICHES, TOAST, BISCUITS.
One and a half lbs. cheese, 1/4 lb. butter, a pinch of ground mace, 1/2 teacup Chablis wine, a pinch of pepper, clarified butter.
Grate the cheese and pound it with the butter, moisten with the wine, add the seasoning. Pot it and press down well. Cover with clarified butter and keep in a cool, dry place till required.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
Indignity is presented on Ghost. Indignity recommends Ghost for your Modern Publishing needs. Indignity gets a slice if you do this successfully!
