I Fichi D'india [Italian Edition]

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Warning ladies and gentleman: it IS a huge prickly succulent but if you look closer you may find something oh so delicious within it’s spiky womb. Farmers claim it works better than Compeed, provided of course they do not puncture their thumbs on the long prickly spikes. If anyone is growing one please make sure it does not get out of control and do not let it start growing near our rivers and native areas. Then I googled for sicilian prickly pear and found this wonderful blog which I am now going to share on that facebook page. He used a very long bamboo stick and was really careful to be in tailwind not to be hurt by the invisible and painful spines ready to land on the picker, if he wasn’t careful.

The process of moving the famous potted citrus trees into the orangery for winter was just about to begin. Some people who traveled with us told me they had never seen and tasted the “Fico d’India,” the fruit of a tropical plant you find in Sicily, so I thought it a good idea to talk about it and show you a few pictures. Now, thanks to your blog, the other 5 remaining will not go to waste, I will try to make the vinegarette and use it on salads! Plus it has a light, almost dessert-like flavor that is what makes it worth it to go through all this trouble!Il Manfredoniano has an excellent video on how the local sellers clean cactus fruit in literally seconds. First, I have been told explicitly that, even in the polite, fancy company of a dinner party, you don’t eat this fruit with a fork. This second harvest takes advantage of the first rains and always produces larger fruit than the first. Your basic goal is to move it around in your mouth, guiding both the seeds and the actual fruit from your tongue to the top of your mouth, then down your throat.

After negotiating the endless prickles of the plant and cutting around the spiky skin of the fruit, the sweet fleshy pulp filled with pips is eaten with particular relish by locals.The plant, also known in English as Indian fig opuntia, barbary fig, cactus pear, spineless cactus, or mostly prickly pear, is typical of arid and semiarid parts of the world.

Sicilians love them and those of you who have travelled to Sicily would have seen them growing all over the countryside, eaten them after the meal in restaurants (as the cleansing fruit) and seen them for sale from the back of trucks on roadsides and in markets. Moreover you have the trouble of liberating the fruit from the thorny skin, which is a bit of a turn off. i once watched a group of friends in Italy do ’rounds’ as the woman selling them out the trunk of her car peeled them. I had a sister and cousins who loved them as much as I did, so it was always a study in patience to leave them to ripen long enough, but a race to get to them first the moment they did. The plant serves as fencing, and the varied colours of dusty blue-green leaves with yellow and orange flowers and red fruits looks terrific in the landscape.

It’s commonly found in Southern Italy, in particular in Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Sardinia.

The more succulent varieties have soaked in the water of the first Autumn rains which give them a juicy quality. As the woman sampled the fruit that had been peeled and presented to her, I enquired ‘dolce o acida? One interesting tradition is winery owners giving the fruit to their grape-pickers for breakfast to prevent them from eating grapes during the harvesting. When I dragged S down in the valley with me to take pictures, one of the men I’d seen in the mornings watched us from above.afraid to spend the money on them and then let them sit while I figure out how to eat the darned things !