Hi—
I hope you love figs as much as I do, because today I’m debuting a new series that highlights botanical relationships between ingredients (I’ve been compiling an “Ingredients Family Tree” for years), and today’s features the fig and the mulberry.
Below all of the pesky paragraphs that follow, there’s a recipe (for paid subscribers) that is as easy as it is satisfying: a “snacking cake” if ever there was one. I’ve been putting all kinds of sweet and savory toppings on thin-crust cornbread lately, and this mulberry-and-fig combination, with a side of whipped tahini-honey butter, is my favorite.
Note that I’ve made the whipped tahini-honey butter ingredients list visible for everyone, paid and unpaid. Just mix the ingredients together!
Enjoy your weekend, and please let me know what you think of the cornbread (comments section below).
Talk to you soon. Thank you for reading this.
Brian
P.S. Remember to scroll down for the recipe.
*Formal Assignment P.S. is for paid subscribers. It’s just $5 a month—or even less for an annual subscription.
“We’re Related!”: A New Series (i.e. Botanical Relationships as Ingredient Inspiration)
Sometimes ideas for flavor combinations just come to you via intuition or subconscious associations, and sometimes you have to go looking for them. The latter case is why books like The Flavor Bible and The Flavor Thesaurus exist: to offer lists of flavor affinities among ingredients that have been approved by a good number of subjective taste buds. In addition to The Flavor Bible, I also refer to Nose Dive, Harold McGee’s 2022 book which breaks a vast selection of ingredients (as well as much less appetizing items) down into the volatile aroma (read: flavor) compounds. I’m fascinated by McGee’s revelation of unexpected commonalities as well as his confirmation that some aromatic similarities we notice between ingredients are owed to shared chemical compounds.
Another source of inspiration I began to tap several years ago is botanical relationships. Though every dish we make may not scream “fruit” or “vegetable,” there are nearly always (hopefully!) plant-derived ingredients involved. Take crème brûlée, for instance: although it’s a very dairy-forward dessert, vanilla bean and cane sugar are important ingredients. Looking at relatives of vanilla might lead you to consider saffron to jazz things up, while you might also find inspiration from the knowledge that corn, sorghum, and millet are a not-so-distant relatives of sugarcane. If we take it a step further and consider the dairy cow’s ideal diet of grasses, we find that those grass species might be related to tonka beans, licorice, barley, wheats, or oats; the marigolds often fed to hens to brighten their yolks are kin of chicory and chamomile. Get the picture? – it’s not a machine to produce surefire ingredient combinations, but it is a reliable engine for brainstorming.
We’re Related: Figs & Mulberries
I’m kicking the series off with figs and mulberries, because it’s fig season, and I happen to be in Greece at the moment, where fresh figs abound. The fig tree, as I wrote in the “Fruit File” in my book, “was first cultivated in southern Arabia and made its way to the Mediterranean some 6,000 years ago.” And it’s not just one of my favorite fruits; “The prophet Mohammed is said to have exalted the fig...as the most paradisal of all fruits. By the mid-sixteenth century, fig trees were being grown in locales as far flung as China, England, and the Americas.” Today, the most fruitful producers include Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Iran, Spain, Syria, the USA, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.
I first encountered white mulberries in dried form years ago while cruising the sundries section of what was at the time my local natural foods store (Perelendra in Brooklyn). I loved their mild, sweet flavor and their unique texture: delicate crunch alongside subtle chewiness—all vaguely akin to figs. I haven’t been able to find statistics on production of dried mulberries—it seems the tree that bears the fruit, the Morus alba, is valued much more for its function in the silk industry: its leaves are the only thing that silkworms eat. Bags I find are usually marked “Product of Turkey,” or, sometimes, Afghanistan (both countries have a silk industry).
How Are Figs and Mulberries Related?
The trees that yield both fruits are classified into the “Moraceae” family (which also counts the jackfruit and breadfruit trees among its members). If we slide down the branch of the classification tree, we land at the broader Rosales order, which includes apples and pears, stone fruits, a number of berries, and roses; these are more distant relatives of figs and mulberries.
When it comes to both mulberries and figs, what we think of as the fruits are actually fused petal-less inflorescences (clusters of flowers); in the case of mulberries, the flowers form in such a way that they resemble drupelets (the individual units that aggregate as a blackberry or raspberry), while in the case of figs, the flowers are enveloped within their stalk, only to be revealed when the bulbous fruit is cut open. As evolutionary ecologist Katherine Preston writes in her piece for “The Botanist in the Kitchen,” “Under a magnifying lens, mulberry and fig flowers are remarkably similar….A fig is essentially an inside-out mulberry, an entire edible flower cluster hidden down inside its own stalk.” Each of the flowers contained in a fig or mulberry in turn contains a seed (within what’s called an achene), giving mulberries and figs their distinctive seedy crunch.
Culinary Implications
In addition to their textural similarity, figs and mulberries clearly have some crossover in terms of flavor notes. In Nose Dive, McGee describes the fig’s component aromas as “fruity, cream-buttery, woody, almond, floral”. I’d say that all of those apply to dried white mulberries as well, with a bit more weight in the honey-butter and floral notes in mulberries.
Because of their subtle flavor and complex sweetness, I incorporated dried white mulberries into many recipes in my book, Good & Sweet, including the Finnish Blueberries & Cream Tart and Chewy Oat Bars. When the time came to formulate a streusel topping for my Fig Crumble, semi-crunchy dried white mulberries made perfect sense.
RECIPE: FIG & MULBERRY CORNBREAD with WHIPPED TAHINI-HONEY BUTTER
Figs and mulberries are a match made in taxonomic heaven. In this shallow cornbread — made with yogurt and olive oil for extra flavor and tenderness — fig slices create an alluring visual pattern while dried mulberries support them from below the surface with sweetness and flavor that all but melts into the batter. Honey and anise seeds add complementary complexity to this fruited quickbread. Once you taste the whipped tahini-honey butter, it’s possible you’ll keep a jar of it on hand at all times to slather on anything that crosses your path. Dried white mulberries can be found in natural food stores, in some supermarkets, and online; you can substitute chopped dried figs, which will be slightly chewier and have a bolder flavor.
Yield: 10-12 servings
Active time: 15 minutes
Total time: 50 minutes
INGREDIENTS:
For the whipped tahini-honey butter (optional):
90 g (6 ½ Tbsp) salted European-style butter, room temperature (soft)
60 g (4 Tbsp) tahini
30 g (4 tsp) honey
For the cornbread:
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