Fruity souvenirs from the Canaries’ warm climes

FIRST MORNING back from the ever-lovely island of La Gomera, in the Canaries, and it’s porridge with figs for breakfast; fresh figs purloined from a roadside tree as we drove across the island to catch the boat to Tenerife for our flight home.

Sliced fresh figs, “skin an’ all,” like the natives are said to “ate potatoes” in Cork. Tomorrow, it will be mangoes as big as Jaffa oranges, sliced, like the figs, because that is the secret of eating mangoes. Bite into them, and you will have a face-full of juice and dentures full of fibres.

Lightly score the skin into segments with a knife tip and pull it off, and then slice the meat off the stone into strips. The result will be juice on your fingers, juice on the plate, and the most delicious slivers of soft fruit you have ever tasted.

In Gomera, huge mangoes are now everywhere — falling from the trees — mangoes so heavy that they would knock you out if they hit you on the head.

Back when an orange for Christmas was a novelty, we Irish had no opportunity to appreciate these luscious fruits, golden and pink as a sunburst; now, however, mangoes can be bought in the cities, in Cork’s English Market, on Dublin’s Moore Street, although they are not cheap.

A decent, ripe mango, peeled and sliced with care, however, is worth every penny.

On the third day home, we will have passion fruit with our breakfast. These, also, have been carried from Gomera.

They were not purloined, nor were the mangoes. In fact, so many were we given to us by neighbours, and so many littered the pathway from our house — in the banana plantations — to the beach, that we could have brought a hundredweight home, gratis.

But one can no longer carry hundredweights onto a plane.

We will eat the passion fruit as one might eat a boiled goose egg, by taking the top half off and eating the insides with a spoon.

One can eat a sea urchin the same way, but that’s another story. An egg cup of goose-egg proportions would be the thing: one could probably find one by scouring antique shops. However, in the interim, we will simply split the fruit horizontally with a sharp knife and spoon the contents back.

Passion fruit is half the size of a large lemon, light as a feather and surprisingly tangy, given its name.

One would expect a torrid, perfumed flavour, redolent of seraglio nights: instead, the taste is sharp; it makes one suck one’s teeth. Inside are seeds, surrounded by soft jelly, rather like pomegranate seeds only green, and small enough to swallow.

Full of goodness, passion fruits contain a veritable alphabet of vitamins. It so happens that an ancient passion vine grows behind our house in West Cork.

It was, we are told by a woman whose father built the house, planted some 40 years ago, and has survived drought and ill-treatment, seemingly thriving on disregard.

It produces flowers, but no fruit. Perhaps if we loved it more and talked to it in dulcet tones, it might yield us a tangy, bitter-sweet harvest. Meanwhile, I brought back a passion flower from a fruit-festooned La Gomera vine to rub against a West Cork passion flower. Perhaps its stamen needs stimulating. We shall see.

The flowers are beautiful and ingenious in their construction, exotic and probably inviting to bees.

However, they are ivory white and dark purple, hardly the colour of passion.

There is a fig tree in Timoleague, in West Cork, which is laden with large fruits some years, perhaps all, but when I purloined one in passing (as is my wont with wayside fig trees) it was disappointing, inedible in fact.

However, for better or worse, we may soon have a climate when our ancient vine may be fairly groaning under the weight of passion fruit and the Timoleague fig burgeoning with a toothsome harvest at this time of the year. In Gomera, my son surfed the white waves: I didn’t, but enjoyed the sea. A few degrees warmer than ours, one could spend hours in it.

Perhaps, for better or worse, we may live to spend hours in the sea off West Cork.