Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

A neighbor of ours has a fig tree – an insanely prolific fig tree, to which we have been going regularly and with permission – to harvest the bounty. And a bounty there is; so much that we came and took about six or seven pounds yesterday morning and today when we went past their house with the dogs on morning walkies, the senior lady of the house called out to us, and said that we should come by and pick some figs. There is a point in fruit-tree production, when energetic picking of the ripe barely makes a dent. I learned this early on, when we had an orange tree at Hilltop House, an orange tree which produced and produced and produced so much that the ground underneath it was redolent with the smell of rotting oranges. One very hot and dry summer, my sister and I quixotically decided that we ought not to let all of this go to waste, so we went up one morning, picked several large brown paper shopping bags of those that were ripe (and that was barely a fraction of the fruit on the darned thing!) and worked until nearly midday, halving and squeezing the oranges … which gave us too many gallons of orange juice to fit into the freezer.

The brush at the top of the hill caught fire that day, and after it was extinguished, we took the many jugs of freshly-pressed local orange juice up to the firemen, who appreciated it greatly. But after that point we kind of decided that … we’d just use what we needed. So it was when I lived in a tiny house in South Ogden, which had a hedge of apricot trees. The ground underneath them was paved with rotten apricots and mined with the hard pits, and never mind that I did with them what I could, brought bags of them into work to swap with co-workers who also lived in owned or rented properties which also had bearing fruit trees planted in their yards, dried them, made preserves out of them … so I can understand that the people living in the house with the fig tree in the front yard are now probably sick to death of the sight and smell of them. But still – free fruit is not to be scorned, especially in this economy… and so I’ve been drying them, and making jam and preserves, and even fermenting a couple of gallons of fresh fig wine out of the bounty of figs. (I really wish that the various developers and owners of houses in Texas had done more often what was routine in Utah – and that was to plant at least one bearing fruit tree per housing unit.)

Some of this out-put of the canning kettle will be used for Christmas presents, but the rest of it – pickles and relishes, mostly – will be used for home consumption. The okra and mixed vegetable pickles are divine, by the way. And cheaper than purchased, even figuring in the cost of making them … which is one of my reasons for going all D-I-Y in the first place. The other reason is that maybe I am being affected by the current atmosphere, or the whispers of my grandmothers, who routinely stockpiled supplies of preserved foods against winter (Granny Jessie, who grew up on a farm) or Granny Dodie, (who lived through the Depression and whose garage held about two years worth of canned foods.) There’s something reassuring about knowing you can get along for a couple of weeks or moths on the stocks of food on your own shelves. And right now, this is one thing that I can do.

This is one of the best old fashioned and simple recipes for preserved figs, by the way – from The Gift of Southern Cooking: sprinkle two pounds of fresh figs (anything other than the black Black Mission variety) with two or three tablespoons of baking soda, and soak for five minutes in boiling water. (This toughens the skins of the figs so that they stay whole.) Drain the figs and rinse them in fresh water, then put them into a non-reactive pot (that is, enamel or glass) and sprinkle two cups of sugar over them. Steep the figs in sugar for at least twelve hours, until the juice from the figs has begun to liquefy the sugar. Simmer for ten minutes, cover and set aside and let steep overnight. Simmer ten minutes, set aside to steep. Repeat once more, and at the end of the third simmer, remove the figs with a slotted spoon and pack into sterilized pint canning jars. Strain the syrup, and simmer until it reaches °220 degrees, pour over the figs, and process in boiling water for fifteen minutes. The canned figs are thus to be aged a month before being eaten.

(cross-posted at Chicagoboyz)

“Mom? Is it OK if we stop by the bar on the way home from Vacation Bible School?” asked my daughter one morning in the summer of 1989 or so, and I confess that I had lived overseas for so long at that point,  that it took me at least five minutes to realize that to most Americans there would be something seriously out of whack about that sentence. Especially since I replied, “OK, sweetie, just call me when you get home.”

We were living then in a rental duplex home in an urbanization — a suburb, or development, on the outskirts of a pleasantly ordinary city in Spain. San Lamberto had once been the housing area dedicated to USAF families attached to Zaragoza AB. After a really unfortunate mishap involving a misplaced n*****r munition in the Med, the base was closed and the housing area sold off to individual local nationals at fire-sale rates. My present landlords’ father had snapped up several duplex units, one for each of his sons. Since at the time,  the units (four-unit duplexes, two up and two down, with either deck or balcony overlooking their own generous yard) were about the only housing stock in Zaragoza  resembling a garden apartment unit, they were favored by American families assigned to the base, when American operations returned to the area several years later. Most of the units which were not in the pot as rental units to Americans or to Spaniards as summer cottages during the hot summers, were purchased by well-to-do Spaniards who liked them as up-scale garden residences year round, conveniently located just off the main road to Logrono, the main surface road out of town towards the north. A very long apartment block went up, overlooking the road and shielding the duplexes from the traffic noise from the Logrono road, and the turn-off to the municipal airport and the Garapinillas gate which gave onto the Spanish side of the establishment. This intersection, while conveniently located for those Americans who had every-day business on the base, was also advertised in our base safety briefings as one of the most dangerous and unpredictable intersections in municipal Zaragoza, owing to a bizarre arrangement of traffic lights. Personal injury lawyers could have made an excellent living, merely by renting those apartments overlooking this intersection, and at the sound of screeching brakes and a certain metallic crunch, tossing down business cards from their balcony onto to the vehicular mayhem down below.

The other side of the apartment block, facing inwards onto the development, or urbanization, was rather more immediately important, because the ground floor,  opening onto a generous sidewalk and sheltered by the overhang of the apartment block above,  was given over to a variety of commercial establishments. There was a restaurant which opened in the last few months of my residence there, after many years of wrangling with the municipal authorities, a stationary store which retailed school supplies and a wonderful variety of candies, a bakery — only an outlet and drop-off point for a commercial establishment with ovens elsewhere, although they had a delivery service that offered freshly baked loaves of bread and croissants delivered to your house every morning. Oddly enough, there was an antique store with a lovely variety of odd bits of furniture (there was a little Art Nouveau ladies’ writing desk which I shall ever regret not buying, a steal at about 350$). Because of the high-income in the urbanization, it managed to stay in business, although the larger items of inventory stayed there, year in and year out.

But the two most essential businesses in San Lamberto — and the ones of longest duration — were neighborhood small grocery store with everything that we had forgotten to get on base, and where the owners were teaching me all the Spanish I needed to purchase this and that, and the Bar Urba. The Bar Urba was the clubhouse and chosen gathering space in San Lamberto, in the tiny storefront premise and on tables and benches set out on the sidewalk outside. In the summer, they had the concession at the community pool, set up under a canvas awning, with tables set under the trees. Year round, the Bar Urba was open most hours of the day and evening, offering coffee and snacks at all hours, and access to pay phones and video games. Of a summer evening, everyone was there, drinking the house sangria, at 100 pesetas a glass, while the children showed off their skill on skateboards and bicycles — the neighborhood played host to a flock of children, wheeling like seagulls on their bicycles, there in a moment and then off again — but in the evenings, the bicycles were flung in a tangled heap while the children begged a couple of hundred pesetas for a plate of pomme frites. A plate of fried potatoes, with a dollop of mayonnaise and a dash of hot sauce, a most popular tapa, a ‘little dish’.

My daughter and I loved tapas, the bar food of Spain, but as far above the usual American conception of bar food as haute cuisine is above a supermarket frozen entree. Tiny toasted cheese sandwiches, just a couple of bites, perfect for a kid’s finicky appetite; slices of cantaloupe melon wrapped in a paper-thin slice of jamon Serrano, the salty dark pink cured ham of Spain— every bar worth mention maintained a whole jamon with slivers of it carved off as needed, and the supermarket Alcampo sold them in a special section that smelled like moldy gym socks. Whole roasted tiny birds, bubbling in fat, a slice of tortilla— a sturdy frittata of potatoes and eggs, crisp slices of chorizo sausage, or whole anchovies— as different from the leathery strips of salted fish jerky as you can imagine, all served  with a slice of crusty bread, battered and deep-fried shrimps, and my favorite, ensalata de pulpo — a chilled salad of minced tomatoes, green peppers and onions with cooked octopus, marinated in lemon juice and olive oil. So much better than a restaurant, which was expensive, and fussy, and time-consuming; a place with good tapas already had the small plates made up, and under glass on a section of the bar; perfect for that middle-of-the-day, don’t want-to-fill-up, just-a-little-something-to-tide-you-over nibbling. Just a little plate or two, of whatever took your fancy.

A proper neighborhood bar, like Bar Urba wasn’t a nasty x-rated place, either, although there were those, downtown around the old narrow streets in what they called the Tubes. One of the low, vulgar places in the Tubes featured a stripper who had allegedly been plying her trade since before Franco.  A kind of institution by the 1980ies, I always imagined her performances being met with raucous cries of “Put it on, put it on!” Male friends assured me, though, even the bars in the Tubes were fairly couth, and in most other places— there were even bars at highway gas stations! — astonishingly family friendly places. There was even a bar in Zaragoza’s amusement park, with a terrace overlooking one of the popular rides for little children. I couldn’t help thinking that was an eminently sensible way to arrange things; the children could pursue their interests on the little bumper cars and the miniature trains and merry-go-round, while their parents relaxed with something cold and alcohol-based, or coffee, if preferred.

Everyone had their interests catered to, at the same time, and in the same place, and yet they could enjoy that time together. It also had the side benefit of making alcohol rather prosaic, not glamorous and forbidden, although I had to do a lot of explaining on the day we came back to the United States, to the JFK international arrivals hall, and I decided that I wanted to celebrate with a stiff gin and tonic. “Sweetie, you’ll have to wait outside the bar for me.”  “Why?” She said, reasonably enough. “Because children aren’t allowed into bars in this country!”

The look of outrage on her face said two things: What?!!!!! And for two cents, I’d get back on the plane and go back to a place where bars are sensible places.

“Custom of the country, sweetie, ” I said helplessly. “They just do things differently here.”