Ficus carica, a fruit with many extraordinary features. The lifecycle of some sorts of fig depends on the efforts made by a tiny insect, the fig wasp, to reproduce itself: efforts which have a pathetic aspect, since they often fail in their main purpose, and lead to the production of more figs instead of more wasps.
In consumption as well as in generation, the fig is unusual. In the warm countries where it grows easily it is a cheap and staple food. Elsewhere fresh figs are a luxury and the fruit is better known in its dried form, whose characteristics are quite different.
The fig tree is the descendant of a wild tree, the caprifig (goat fig). This had spread from W. Asia into the Mediterranean region in prehistoric times, and then out to the Canary Islands and northwards as far as Germany. Wild figs may be eaten, but they are small and dry. The process of selection and cultivation, necessary to obtain palatable fruit, began in remote antiquity and continued in classical times. Over two dozen kinds of fig were known to the Romans.
The fig, already peculiar, became stranger still as it evolved from a wild to a cultivated plant. The mature fig fruit is botanically not a single fruit but almost 1,500 tiny fruits, which are normally what are thought of as the seeds. These are fixed to the inside of a vase-shaped structure, termed a ‘syconium’, which is the outer part of the fig. Earlier, at the flower stage, the syconium is the same shape but much smaller. It contains all the flowers and is completely closed except for a tiny hole at the opposite end from the stem.
The syconium of the wild caprifig contains both male and female flowers, but these are unable to fertilize each other because the female flowers mature some time before the male flowers produce pollen. Fertilization depends on a tiny, gnat-sized insect, the fig wasp, Blastophaga grossorum, which inhabits the syconium. Only the female wasp has wings. She develops over the winter inside a female flower, and is impregnated by the male in the spring. She then crawls around the inside of the syconium, thus becoming covered with pollen from the male flowers which surround it, until she finds the way out through the little hole. She leaves and flies to another synconium which, with luck, will be at an earlier stage and contain fertile female flowers. Entering it through its little hole, she finds a female flower and tries to lay her eggs down its style, ready to produce another generation of wasps. But the other female flowers nearby are pollinated as the wasp brushes against them, and will form fertile seeds.
The fertile fruits will give rise to a new generation of fig trees (even if they are eaten by humans or birds, for they pass through the body of either undamaged) and these trees in turn will depend on the caprifig and the wasps to help them have fruits of their own.
Cultivation started in Egypt or possibly Arabia, probably between 4000 and 2700 bc. There is a painting on the wall of an Egyptian tomb of the 12th dynasty, about 1900 bc, which clearly shows cultivated figs being harvested from a tree. By about 1500 bc figs were being grown in Crete and by 800 bc in mainland Greece. This was the age of Homer, who mentions them several times. The fig may have come to Greece from Crete, but the Greeks themselves thought that it had arrived from Caria in Asia Minor; hence the species name carica. At the same time the fig became established all over the Near East. It is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible.
The ancients discovered through experience that cultivated Smyrna figs would fruit only if there was a caprifig tree nearby. They would hang bits of caprifig branch in the boughs of the cultivated figs to encourage fertilization. (This is still practised, and is known as ‘caprification’.) It is remarkable that in the 4th century bc both Aristotle and Theophrastus realized the need for the flower to be visited by the tiny fig wasp if the fruit were to form and not merely fall off.
The Romans used to eat large amounts of both fresh and dried figs. The finest fresh ones were an expensive delicacy, while cheap ones were described by Pliny as the food of slaves. Dried figs were used mostly as a sweetener and to make sweetmeats, their high natural sugar content being particularly valued in an age when sugar was an exotic rarity. Figs were used also in savoury dishes, and a Roman would not be surprised by the modern Italian habit of eating fresh figs with prosciutto.
During the period of the Roman Empire, new kinds of fig appeared which had less or no need for the fig wasp. The most important was what is now called the ‘common fig’, which produces two crops annually, neither of which needs to be caprified. So figs could increase their range, previously confined to the rather narrow band of climates which suited the wasp. This expansion of range achieved its greatest success much later, in the Americas. After an introduction to Haiti and Mexico in the 16th century, and then to Virginia, the fig found its real N. American home in California. In 1769 the Franciscan mission at San Diego was founded and began to grow a Spanish black common fig which (under the names of Mission or Franciscana) came to be a leading variety. American growers, who for long regarded the traditional European caprification process as a mere superstition, eventually learned how to grow Smyrna figs too.
In considering all the different sorts of fig, it is helpful to remember that there are four main botanical categories of fig (see table); and that within these are many commercial varieties (hundreds of them) of which only the most important are mentioned in what follows.
| Type | Method of fertilization | Number of crops annually |
|---|---|---|
| Caprifig | by fig wasp | three |
| Smyrna | by caprification (fig wasp needed) | two |
| Common | parthenocarpic (no fig wasp needed) | two |
| San Pedro | parthenocarpic (1st crop) by caprification (2nd crop) | two |
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
