This summer I was wondering around the streets and markets of Paris (like rue Mouffetard, in the 5ème, for instance), with Carla, an Italian friend of mine, someone who has traveled the world, always thirsty for knowledge and eager for knowledge. In almost equatorial heat, we pass a fruit and vegetable stall where Carla, discovers something that seems to interest her very much. It is colorful figues de Barbarie, as we call in France your prickly pears.
There were all colors of them: from yellow-orange, to green, to white, to blood red. It is this last prickly pear color that arouses and stimulates attention in Carla. "Do you know," she tells me…,
"that this color is carmine, the same as the lipstick we all use? It is a natural shade of red made from the desiccated body of an insect, the prickly pear mealybug?"
I confess my ignorance, I didn't know that. And Carla begins to unleash all her knowledge on this subject. I thus learn that before the advent of synthetic dyes, there was no other way to procure that shade of red than by raising colonies of insects that swarmed around the prickly pear plants that grew wild in warm territories near the sea. The insects were caught, allowed to dry, and the precious carmine was obtained. Seeing me interested, Carla continues and explains that those plants, originally from Mexico, had come down to us many centuries ago.
The story goes something like this:
At the end of the 15th century, the caravels of Christopher Columbus, after crossing the ocean, landed in distant and wild lands. Those good sailors had set out in search of a short route to the Indies and never imagined that they had arrived on a new continent instead.
Someone has said that if Christopher Columbus had had a Waze-type satellite navigator at that time, he would surely have reached the Indies in less time, but he would never have discovered America.
The truth is that, curious and hungry after so much travel, Columbus' good sailors did not hesitate to pick and eat the strange fruits that plants and trees they had never seen before made available to them. Among those fruits, which were plentiful, there was one in particular, covered with small and very annoying thorns, but unexpectedly sweet and tasty, which quickly proved to be a most effective remedy against scurvy, the disease that decimated crews on long sea voyages.
This was an excellent reason to load plants and fruits onto ships with the intention of using them on the return voyage to Europe.
None of them suspected that the cures were due to Vitamin C, discovered only a few centuries later, present in large quantities in the sweet fruits.
The first landfall in our parts was Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, where the plants took root effortlessly. Migratory birds did the rest. They pecked at the fruits, eating their pulp and seeds and then ... eliminated the latter in flight through digestion. Where the seeds fell, the prodigious plant sprang up and spread. The closest territories to the Canary Islands? Those bordering the Mediterranean, including Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, southern Italy, and northern Africa. But what name to give the fruits of that miraculous plant? They were as sweet as figs, they came from the Indies, so figs of India. In France they became figues de Barbarie, because they came from barbaric countries, like newly discovered wild lands.
The plants sprouted and multiplied spontaneously and needed no special care. Thus it was that the prickly pear spread everywhere around the Mediterranean coasts, where it seems to have found the ideal habitat.
We are now out of season to enjoy the original exotic flavor of the prickly pear, but if you come across it another year, don't hesitate to try this fruit that I think is exceptional. Either way, whether you like it or not, you will always have something of the prickly pear on your lips: the lipstick carmine that makes you so alluring and desirable.
Copyright Photo: CoffeAndMilk for iStock (id.1068004784)
