Go Fig or Go Home

“I only smoke weed on three occasions,” my new friend Ed told me as we sat down for a tasting of homegrown fruits on his back porch in Breezy Point. “The first is before a Rangers game. And the second is before I eat a pawpaw.” Then he trailed off, too focused on the fare to finish his thought.

I had met Ed two days earlier at Fig Fest, a homespun celebration of that biblical fruit, the Ficus carica, held every year in the plaza outside Staten Island’s National Lighthouse Museum. It was a sunny September day, and I came with two goals: eat some locally grown free samples and cheer the coronation of the 2024 Fig King, an event of such importance that I found it advertised in the Staten Island Ferry terminal as I made my way to the 3:00 p.m. boat. Ed, on the other hand, was there to sell some of the young plants that he kept in pots along the side of his driveway—not just figs, grown from cuttings, but pawpaws too, seedlings that were a product of his own twenty-year-old tree. Other dealers sold grape vines, geraniums, and even tropical citrus alongside their figs, but the pawpaws were Ed’s specialty, making his booth one of the busiest at the festival.

The ceremonies began with a pun-based performance by members of the local Riverside Opera Company. The group’s baritone sang some of The Marriage of Figaro and all of “Largo al factotum,” the “Figaro, Figaro” aria from The Barber of Seville. A group of about forty people cheered him on, but interest quickly waned when the set continued with other, less resonant tunes. The baritone seemed displeased, perhaps burdened by the knowledge that neither of his crowd-pleasers concerned figs in the first place. Maybe he was resentful of “Sir Isaac Fig Newton,” a man in period costume handing out his namesake treats not far from the stage.

Along the edge of the plaza, vendors sold potted figs of dozens of varieties, both hardy figs that can survive outside in our region’s Zone 4 winters and more sensitive plants that require protection from a hard frost. Ed, who is a few years past retirement, looked to be about average age for a fig dealer—if not a little on the younger side. (“You met at the festival?” his wife asked incredulously when I showed up at their house. “I didn’t realize anyone under 60 went to that thing.”) My friend Siobhan keeps a small Chicago Hardy fig on her balcony in Prospect Heights, and she wanted to find out why it produced less fruit than usual this year. We took her question to a man who calls himself the Fig Doctor, and he suggested that she protect the buds by overwintering her tree under a garbage bag full of leaves, then apply fertilizer in the spring.

Our physician was heartened to meet a “young” (by festival standards) grower who is keeping the hobby alive in his home borough. As a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, and the only person in his large Italian family not to leave for Staten Island or New Jersey, he proudly told us that the Chicago Hardy is also called the Bensonhurst Purple; its legendary cold tolerance, he said, can be traced back to an original source high on the slopes of Mount Etna, where a Sicilian emigrant snagged a cutting before crossing the Atlantic. True or not, we ate it up. Then he changed the subject to antiwhite discrimination on the subways, and we slowly backed away, staking out our seats for the crowning of the Fig King.

A part of me had wondered if this main event would be a ritual out of The Wicker Man (1973), the sovereign served up for the benefit of next year’s crop. In fact it was a cooking contest, and it was won by a woman who baked a fig upside-down cake. Second place went to a fellow millennial, one of the few at the festival, but my generational solidarity melted at the unseemly sight of his fig-and-olive nachos smothered with mozzarella cheese.

Ed had run out of samples by the time I reached his table, which is how I scored an invite to his postage-stamp food forest behind the gates of Breezy Point. I never did find out the third occasion on which he smokes weed, but that just added a little mystery to our meal. Pawpaws are known for a beguiling, banana-like flavor, and Ed’s didn’t disappoint, offering notes of vanilla and mango as I bit into its custardy flesh. Was this complexity characteristic of the particular variety Ed had grown? Or did it develop from his tiny backyard’s unique terroir, the plant’s taproot digging down a mere hundred yards from the beach and a few feet from a septic tank? It’s hard to say.

We followed the pawpaws with a variety of fig called Rockaway Green, which caused a minor sensation when Ed himself introduced it to the broader fig community. Juvenile plants he listed on eBay sold for hundreds of dollars. The parent tree, he explained, was right there in Breezy Point, and the owner told him that her grandfather had brought it as a cutting when he came from Palermo. Ed submitted the fruit, uncooked, to the Fig Fest cooking contest, and it earned runner-up, even though the submission had apparently broken the contest’s cardinal rule. When Ed presented one to me, he ran his paring knife down the fruit’s meridian, allowing its Brat-hued skin to open upon a purple galaxy of juicy color. It felt like I was eating a delicious geode grown from a tree.

The original Rockaway Green tree survived the colder New York winters of the twentieth century due to the relatively mild temperature of its beachside home. Like the old, cold-tolerant figs that still thrive in neighborhoods such as Carroll Gardens and Astoria, it is living proof of how emigration from Southern Europe transformed the city. But in Ed’s backyard garden, I felt like I was looking forward, not back, catching a glimpse of a climate-adapted future where an abundance of delicious fruit is grown and shared across the five boroughs.

Upon leaving, however, I was quickly jolted back to the present. One of Breezy Point’s rent-a-cops flagged me down and accused me of trespassing.