Continuing on my journey of ways with figs, courtesy of our work fruit man, I decided to make a fig pie. On the Internet, I was spoiled for choice with fig pie recipes, but had to carefully side-step the dried fig pies to get to the fresh fig pie recipes.
I eventually settled on what seemed the simplest fresh fig pie recipe that I could find, courtesy of Nancie McDermott of Piedmont, North Carolina. Her recipe is here. You need a lot of figs (4 cupfuls) to make this pie, which can be hideously expensive if you have to buy the figs at the market, but I had a plentiful supply of lovely free figs, and this pie was perfect to ensure I could use them up.
Nancie doesn't supply a pie crust recipe, so I used Dorie Greenspan's Good for Almost Anything pie dough made with all butter and no shortening. The butter makes the pastry more crumbly hence more difficult to work with, but I don't ever buy shortening, so I used what I had to hand.
I also forgot the lemon juice and butter in the pie filling, as I received a phone call as I was rolling out the top crust, which put me off my game. It didn't seem to make any difference to the final flavour, and saved on some calories from even more butter.
And the verdict? My colleague Lee said the pie was "sublime" and "superb", and she liked the cinnamon in the filling. For me, that says it all - go make one!
