Brenda Hulin's Fresh Fig Cake with Fig Preserves

It probably wasn't an apple. Apricot, pear or pomegranate...well, maybe. But more scholars suggest that the eye-opening, original-sin-ushering fruit Eve plucked from the Tree of Knowledge was likely a fig. “Ancient Hebrews wouldn't have known an apple from a hole in the ground,” sums Alan Ridenour, writing in his Offbeat Food: Adventures in an Omnivorous World, “They knew figs however and specifically mentioned fig trees growing in Eden,” leading scholars to suggest that the fig was the fruit intended. And honestly? With its lush fecundity, tender fruit and beguiling fragrance, it's hard not to give a fiddle for a fig.

My mother grew up eating the fresh fruit from a large, spreading fig tree that grew next to her childhood home in southern Texas. Moved by marriage to northern climes, Mom often spoke wistfully of that tree, the scent and the flavor of its fruit, the cool of its shade...and passed her fondness for figs right down to me. So reading cookbook author Belinda Hulin's ode to the fig tree that grew 30 feet high and more than 30 feet wide in her own mother's Louisiana backyard, struck a chord. Hulin's story, featured in her 2010-released Roux Memories, is a beautiful tale of growth, loss and rebirth. She writes, “My mother planted the tree more than thirty years ago. It started as a small cutting from a fig tree at her aunt's house in Carencro, Louisiana. She played under the tree, helped harvest its fruit as girl, and the cutting was a present. As she planted it in our New Orleans backyard, she said a little prayer...hoping for divine intervention. With five kids, a husband, and pets, my mother pretty much thought plants should heal themselves. This one did. Without fertilizing or pruning, dependent on rain for watering, it grew. And grew. And grew.” And as Hulin grew, that fig tree gave back. “Sometimes,” writes Hulin, “like after my father died, or when my first marriage crumbled—I'd wander into the backyard just to visit the fig tree, eat from its branches, and stare into its mystical depths.”

But when the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina hurtled through New Orleans, the tree was destroyed. The contractor who removed displaced trees from Belinda's mom's backyard called to say flooding had killed the tree. He cut it back to a three-foot stump. Time passed. Visiting her mom's a month after renovation was complete, Belinda caught a whiff of something familiar. “It was oppressively hot outside,” she writes, “so I thought I was having some sort of olfactory flashback.” But stepping to the backdoor, Belinda looked closer, “What remained of the majestic fig tree was there, docked to a squat, thick, trunk. But all over it, green leaves were sprouting. Even the stumps that were level with the ground had sent up green shoots on which tiny split-fingered fig leaves were growing.” And in and around the leaves were figs. Hulin says she “inhaled as deeply” as she possibly could, whispered a few sweet nothings to the tree, then called on the patron saint of figs to help that little Tree of Life heal itself.

I love that story, don't you? It's one of the many Hulin shares in Roux Memories. Following Hulin's directions, I mixed up what is now a new, family fig-favorite: fresh-fig cake made with homemade fig preserves.