To a child growing up in a northern climate, figs were a fabled fruit. Along with dates and pomegranates, they completed the triumvirate I thought of as Old Testament Fruit: plump, lush and unknown, like the Promised Land.

I first tried a pomegranate at age 12, and a date sometime in high school. Both were agreeably strange: the pomegranate like lobster, awkward to disassemble and messy to eat, and the date like taffy, dense and almost painfully sweet. But fresh figs seldom appeared in Seattle markets, and not until I was an adult did I realize that there was more to Ficus carica than Fig Newtons.

In 2000, on vacation in Rome, I wandered with a friend through the open-air market in the Campo dei Fiori and saw fresh figs. Green, yellow, purple, and black, they looked like little ceramic vases, dull yet glossy, wobbling on squat bases. We bought some and carted them back to our hotel.

I’ve read since that some people peel their figs, and others will only eat them sliced. We ate them whole, like apples, chewing our way around each fig’s equator. What a perfect fruit, I remember thinking: completely edible, not too sweet, and somehow both elegant and earthy. And nothing like a Fig Newton.

When I arrived in Portland a year ago, I moved into a house shaded by a towering Brown Turkey fig tree. I had always assumed that figs could not survive in the Northwest, but here was this flourishing specimen of warm-weather botany, nearly as tall as our two-story house. With no other trees on the block to steal its sunshine, it was dark with leaves and heavy with fruit. Birds attacked the figs from above, squirrels from below. In my kitchen, I watched, and decided to join in.

At first, I thought I would pick just a few at a time, and eat them out of hand. But soon I had dozens of freshly washed figs drying in rows on dishtowels. In my ignorance and greed, I had picked a wide range of ripeness, from firm, demure green to saggy, blowsy purple. I piled all the fruit together and considered. What do people do with pounds and pounds of figs?

Dry them, perhaps, but I didn’t have a dehydrator. And drying figs into leathery toughness seemed to defeat their purpose. Preserves would be sweet and smooth and less taxing on the teeth, so I dumped my first harvest into a soup pot, added a ridiculous amount of sugar and some lemon juice, and cooked it down to a syrupy stew. Still, left whole and sealed in jars, the figs looked far too much like pickled sea anemones for appeal.

So I dug through a pile of food magazines and found a recipe that magically did what I wanted: kept the figs from becoming fig paste, but alchemized them into something altogether different. Fresh figs will always be a seasonal delight, a moment to be savored only once a year. But bottled in glass, hidden in a basement cupboard, they are mine for good. At least until next summer.

Fig Chutney

Adapted from Saveur magazine (October 2005)

This chutney, adapted from a recipe based on plums, is excellent on any kind of meat, with Indian food, or sandwiched between bread and cheese.

1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 1/4 cups light brown sugar (not firmly packed)
1 cup red wine vinegar
1 1/2 cups dried cranberries
1 small onion, diced
1/3 cup diced fresh ginger
3 large garlic cloves, diced
1 Tbsp. salt
5 tsp. mustard seeds
2 to 3 tsp. red pepper flakes
5 or 6 pounds fresh figs, chopped into 1/2-inch pieces
8 to 10 eight-ounce canning jars and lids

Bring sugars and vinegar to a boil in a large, heavy pot over medium heat. Stir in the cranberries, onion, ginger, garlic, salt, mustard and pepper flakes. Bring to a simmer. Stir in the figs. Reduce heat to a low simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until chutney is dark and thick, about 4 hours.

Sterilize the canning jars in a large pot of boiling water for 10 minutes. Fill each jar with hot chutney, place lids on the jars, and screw on the ring bands. Submerge the filled jars in a pot of gently boiling water for 10 minutes. Transfer the jars to a dishtowel and place at least 1 inch apart; let cool for 24 hours.