The genus Opuntia, more commonly known as the prickly pear, is a variety of cactus that grows all over the world. The Opuntia ficus-indica - or the Fico d’India, grows wild throughout Calabria, where my mother, as a child, picked and ate the plant’s bright red fruit that she found growing everywhere. The Fico d’India runs rampant all over southern Italy, in the places that touch the warm waters of the Mediterranean, not only in Calabria, but Sicily, Puglia, as well as Sardegna.

Spring has not quite come to my town, in coastal Connecticut; the trees are still bare, and the daffodils have not come fully into bloom. Yet walking through my neighborhood, I came across Opuntia - poking out of dry oak leaves that had harbored it over the winter, on a path of sandy soil  next to someone’s mailbox, where it mingled with dead branches and the new green of spring. This, I found out is Opuntia humifusa - the Eastern Prickly Pear, in its most northern American habitat. Also known as Devil’s Tongue, it must have provided proof of an angry God to Jonathan Edwards, when he and the Puritans would patrol this once-wild region. 

Though I associated it so fully with Calabria, Opuntia is actually native to the Americas (in Mexico, its fruit is known as nopales, and is eaten on tacos). The India in its name refers to the Indies, rather than the subcontinent. It was brought to Europe in the 16th century for many reasons, one of which was to cultivate a cochineal dye industry. A parasitic insect, the cochineal lives on the flat pads of the Opuntia, and is a source for red - or carmine - dye. This red dye was also used - since the Middle Ages to make Alchermes, the bright red liquor crucial to the Italian dessert, Zuppa Inglese.