I Fichi D'india [Italian Edition]

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The hard seeds are hard to get past, and they get stuck between the teeth, but most Sicilians swallow them and enjoy the refreshing melon-like flesh. They grab the whole fruit and with a quick flick of the wrist breaks it off the plant, leaving it inside the container. Rosetta's profound love for and attachment to the traditional ways of her native Sicily, along with its cuisine, literature, history and visual and performing arts, represent an important part of her life. The nearest town is Greve – here’s a selection of seasonal produce, including chestnuts, fungi and prickly pear (bottom left).

My dad with some other relatives inherited years and years ago a land on the Mount Etna cultivated with prickly pear cacti, but it was then sold (I was really really disappointed of this choice.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.

Both are delicious and both are full of seeds, but the flavor, texture and look are completely different. Mary, I had some rather uninspiring prickly pears my first time out as well; if they were the yellow kind that you had, I *highly* recommend trying the red as well. Farmers claim it works better than Compeed, provided of course they do not puncture their thumbs on the long prickly spikes. As for their taste, tiny hard pips dominate the first bite, but the soft flesh around them is quite refreshing and sweet like a melon.

I and my mother love this fruit, and we’d love to try growing the yellow ones (like my mom grew up around in Snfratello) but we can’t find a place that will sell this type of plant. My parents are from Sicily and they miss good, sweet ficchi d’India (and so do I)…please contact me at [redacted] if you have any you’d like to share/sell. It grows throughout the island, in every place from roadside verges to coastal strips and in the most isolated areas.

The fruits of the Prickly Pear in Italy are known as Fichi d'India (India Pears), marketed in America with the friendlier, less dangerous name of Cactus Pears. My sister-in-law told me that most of the non-Italians (and even some Italians who didn’t grow up in Sicily like her family) either don’t eat fichi d’india at all because it’s too intimidating, or they eat it wrong. What came to light in the wake of the neighbour’s act of revenge, never known until then, was that a cactus denuded of its first flowering, will have a second one more bountiful than the first.From what I understand you cannot predict the colour- some may be red,orange or yellow but come from the same plant. Of all the exoticism found in the Calabrese landscape the fichi d’india, or prickly pears, stand out as particularly interesting.