Ingredients & Fine Foods

Perhaps you remember the fig ice cream I wrote about earlier in the fall. Wanting to bolster the spirit of my fresh figs — the last of the season — I set out to buy dried figs, only to be told that my organic shop was all out, and still waiting for the new crop to be delivered. Aha! This made complete sense — fresh figs need a little time to dry, yes? — but the seasonality of dried fruits wasn’t a matter I’d ever given much thought to.

Not a fortnight later, waiting in line at the little stand at the Batignolles market where I buy my walnuts and such, I caught sight of a cardboard sign that read, “Figues séchées, nouvelle récolte!” Next to it was a box of baglama figs* from Turkey, wreathed together by a crude string that looped and looped around their tips.

Dried, yes, undoubtedly, but still soft, plump, and holding their pouch-like shape: a far cry from the shrivelled pucks one ordinarily comes across. These were the most glowing dried figs I’d ever seen, and I didn’t need the tasting sample that was kindly offered to know I would not go home without a fig garland.

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Not quite a vegetable but not quite a seaweed, salicornia must have gone through a tough identity crisis as a teenager. And that’s not even taking into account the multiple names it has to answer to — sea bean, sea asparagus, glasswort, or marsh samphire in English, perce-pierre, salicot, cornichon de mer, or criste-marine in French.

Whatever the moniker, salicornia is a wild, succulent plant that grows along the seashore and in salt marshes. It comes in bushes of crisp and juicy twigs that are harvested in late spring to early summer (i.e. now) and can be eaten raw, cooked, or pickled.

Pickled salicornia is easy to come by in Brittany, and in fact this is where I first encountered it as a child: my family vacationed on the coast for a week every spring, and we would buy the occasional jar of softly pickled salicornia to add to the salads my mother made in the awkward kitchen of whatever house we rented.

I was already fond of the sour/salty combo at the time so it was a treat for me, but I suspect that part of my appreciation came from the fact that the word salicorne is so similar to the word licorne (unicorn), which is very cool by any standard, whether you’re an eight-year-old girl or a fan of Blade Runner or both.

The above-pictured salicornia, however, is not pickled. Its bright green color, starkly offset by the fish market blue of the plastic bag, indicates that it is raw: Maxence and I bought it fresh at the poissonnerie last weekend, happy to stumble upon this relative rarity a mere two days after having it at the British ambassador’s house.

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[Ewe’s Milk Butter]

Every once in a while, life presents the gourmand with a scintillating novelty that tickles his curiosity with such insistence that he is left with the willpower of a charmed snake. So when I read about ewe’s milk butter in ELLE a couple of weeks ago (you would do well to keep an eye on those Vie Privée/Cuisine pages at the end of the magazine, they’re full of inspired ideas), it was all I could do not to run out and buy some.

But I was still in my pyjamas (I read ELLE at breakfast, there’s nothing like it), so I simply added the item to the shopping list that’s tacked on to the refrigerator door of my brain, waiting for an opportunity to visit the cheese shop mentioned as a source in the article. And sure enough, a few days later, I met with a friend for ice cream in that neighborhood, and after a chocolate-dipped visit to Patrice Chapon, we dropped by Nicole Barthélémy’s fromagerie.

Hers is a dollhouse of a shop in which you can’t fit much more than five or six human beings amidst the towering shelves of cheeses. Its posh location has earned it a following of assorted movie stars, and the prices have been adjusted accordingly, but I was willing to make an investment for the sake of research.

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[Kumquat from Corsica]

I wrote a little ode to the Corsican clementine last winter, but it turns out one shouldn’t flatter a citrus too much, lest it rest on its laurels and the following year’s crop be a disappointment.

All was not lost, however, on the citrus front: the maltaise orange from Tunisia was honey sweet and remarkably juicy, and a recent visit to the organic market turned up this novelty, at least to me: kumquats from Corsica, bright orange marbles that glowed like miniature lightbulbs.

I’d bought fine specimens earlier in the season, but these belong to a different variety, rounder in shape and even tastier.

If you can get past the multiple seeds — there can be five or six packed in there, probably driving one another batty — the reward is a chewy, juicy and all-natural sourball, so sweet and acidulated you may indeed pop them like candy.

The citrus season is drawing to a close and I don’t know how much longer these will be available, but on the off chance that you visit the Batignolles market tomorrow morning, you will find them at the produce stall that’s the second to last on your right when you’re coming from the Rome metro station.