Nigel Slater’s recipes for fig leaf and kefir milk ice, and aromatic damson gin

Capture the last days of summer with damsons, fragrant figs and gin

I’m up the rickety ladder, my head deep in the fig tree, its leaves spread like giant’s hands. It is my annual race with the blackbirds to get to the ripest fruit. This year, the fruits are the size of burrata, and just as tender, their jelly-flesh richer and sweeter than I have known since first planting the tree as a sapling 20 years ago. The rest of the garden may be as crisp as pork crackling, but the 2022 heatwave has been good for my ficus and its crop.

It would seem rude to meddle too much with fruit as perfect as this. Most will be eaten as it is, the green and purple baubles piled on an oval dish and brought to the table for all to scoff with abandon. But I stop to snap off some of the smaller leaves, too. I need them to adorn a plate of bloomy white goat’s cheese, but more to the point, to make ice-cream. I have made a pale and milky ice with both fruit and leaves before, but this time I want to use kefir in place of some of the milk, to make an ice that is less sweet and with more of the spirit of the tree. Sweetness is something that can dilute the true flavour of any ice, but especially the more elusive apricot or fig.

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