FIGS FOR A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

This is so simple – scarcely a recipe really – but so good. Unless you get figs straight from the tree they sometimes need the blistering heat of an oven or grill to bring out all their honeyed sweetness. The cinnamon is emphatic, certainly, but it doesn’t overwhelm the whole; it, rather, infuses the fruit, along with the kitchen you’re cooking it in, with mellow spiciness. This is the pudding to end a slow-grazing, long-picking dinner eaten outside on a warm, balmy night.

If you haven’t got any vanilla sugar, just use ordinary caster sugar and add a drop of pure vanilla extract along with the flower waters. A Middle-Eastern store of some kind will stock packets of slivered pistachios, vividly green and splintered into little boat-shaped shards. But if you can’t get them, just buy shelled pistachios from a healthshop or supermarket and chop them roughly with a knife or mezzaluna yourself.

12 black figs

50g unsalted butter

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon vanilla sugar

1 and a half teaspoons rosewater

1 and a half teaspoons orange-flower water

1 x 500g tub mascarpone cheese

100g slivered pistachio nuts

Preheat a grill or oven to the fiercest it will go.

Quarter the figs, taking care not to cut all the way through to the bottom, so that they open like flowers, or young birds squawking to be fed worms by their mummy, and sit them, thus opened, in a heatproof dish into which they fit snugly.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan, then add the cinnamon, sugar and flower waters. Stir to combine and pour into the figs.

Blister under the hot grill or bake in the oven for a few minutes and then serve; it’s that quick. Just give each person a couple of figs on a side plate. Splodge alongside some mascarpone over which you drizzle some of the conker-dark syrup, then sprinkle over some of those green, green shards of pistachio.

Serves 6.