Squab with Figs and Olives

For most of us, squab must stand in for a full range of wildfowl that may flock our woods but not our meat markets. Squab, tiny and toothsome, can be partnered with a full range of salts and sweets, among them a California hybrid that began life under the gardening hands of the mission fathers—the Calimyrna fig. Today’s fig industry in the San Joaquin Valley came first by way of the missions and second by way of a minuscule fig wasp, inappropriately named “blastophaga.” A nineteenth-century