A Downright Religious Culinary Experience
Following Taste, Finding More
Glam and Al Covo | Venice, Italy
This past week, I was enjoying what I suspected would be the last of the season’s ripe Black Mission figs. All summer long, I had been conditioned to eat around the mostly gnarly, beat-up, crushed excuses that Whole Foods via Amazon Prime had been shamelessly delivering.
During this same time, my Substack and Instagram feeds had been teeming with figs on display in their full, photogenic glory. More than once, I had studied the random fig post and made a promise to myself that when I leave Chicago, I will not only insist on moving where there are no alligators, tornadoes or Walmarts, but I will insist on planting my flag where my neighbors appreciate, might I go so far as to even say, insist upon life with the fig.
I can’t think of a single piece of fruit, or for that matter any genre of food – not the baguette, anchovy, pastel de nata, steak tartare, street taco – that forces me to pause in textbook A+ presence like the fig. From first bite to last, I am nowhere else in mind, body, gut or soul, than with the fig I’m eating.
It’s a downright religious culinary experience.
From out of nowhere except perhaps heaven, the last two cartons delivered to my house had been pure perfection. Not a blemish on one of them. Their color was rich, deep and uniform. They were actually ripe and soft. Inside, they were bursting with all that to-die-for jammy fig flavor. If any batch was going to trigger a moment, a break in my fever, a life reappraisal, this would have been it.
With groceries still scattered across the kitchen island, I wasted no time sampling. Hunched over the kitchen sink, mouth blissfully full from my inaugural bite, I realized that every time I splurged on fresh figs, the same script ran, though never ever on autopilot.
First, I would bite in slowly as if I had never tried a fig before. And from a place that felt inherited, like an in-my-bones reverence for this fiber- and mineral-dense jewel, I instinctively thanked God, usually aloud, for their flawless form and flavor.
Then, I would study for just a quick beat what remained. I would record a mental snapshot of how the fruit’s moody purple color opened up into a soft, fleshy pink-striated texture. I would marvel at just how simple and perfect it was.
After the second and third bites, which would come with even more audible feedback for the gods of taste – oohs and ahhs, slurps and well-intentioned curse words – I would stand up satiated in an earnest, out-of-body-like gratitude.
Before I would finish the one I had been savoring, already eyeing my next victim out of the corner of my eye, I would find that my thoughts drifted back without fail to that time in Venice when the fig went from over-processed Newton to enchanting, coveted favorite fruit.
That fig, that day, had been served ice-cold, on a bed of crushed ice at the end of a long, elegant tasting menu at Glam. I still close my eyes and feel its taste surge through me.
What a gift, to find a bite that lingers, redefines, invites and inspires. Resisting the habit of assigning it some ethereal meaning, I decided instead to accept it for what it was.
Delicious.
