Another Year in Recipes

On one of our many recent miserably cold, dank, windy, rainy days, Tom came home from the grocery store with four not-on-the-shopping-list peaches and asked me to make a little dessert tart with them. Surprisingly, the peaches were perfectly ripe – soft and fragrant, carrying a hopeful promise of summer. I was happy to take advantage of it.

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I thought a cobbler would be nice. The recipe I usually use calls for several ingredients that would have required another store excursion through the ugly weather, so I looked further afield. There’s a very simple peach cobbler recipe in Lee Bailey’s Country Desserts. It’s the one at lower left in this photo spread of luscious-looking indulgences from the book.

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The recipe has a pastry technique a bit different from any I’d used before, which was another reason it interested me. In the food processor I had to pulse flour, salt, frozen butter, and frozen Crisco; then add enough ice water for the mixture to come together in a ball. I’m not sure what the point of the frozen fats is; maybe it keeps the heat of the processor motor from overly blending the ingredients? In any case, this dough didn’t need to be rested in the refrigerator before rolling it out, as is recommended for most pie and tart doughs.

I rolled the dough into a large rough circle (the book says rough rectangle, but I was making a half recipe and had to use an eight-inch round cake pan) and transferred it to the pan, letting the extra dough hang over the sides. I put in my four peeled, thickly sliced peaches; sprinkled on sugar and generous dots of butter; and folded over the excess pastry. Actually, I used less sugar than the recipe indicated. Many Southern-style dessert recipes strike me as excessively sweet, and I felt that half a cup of sugar would overwhelm the flavor of my four smallish peaches.

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My cobbler baked in a hot oven for 45 minutes and gratified me by coming out looking just as pleasantly rustic as the one in the book.

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It was delightful. Beautiful, bright peach flavors, just sweet enough for our taste, and an effective contrast between the lightly crunchy crust and the lushly soft fruit. We gilded the lily a bit by serving it with whipped cream, which was also not shabby.

Bailey says he makes this dish only in the height of local peach season because “the cobbler’s flavor depends entirely on the flavor of the fruit.” With so few ingredients in the recipe, I can well believe that, and I must say these peaches – way out of season as they were – were outstanding. Next day I went back to the store and got a few more for eating in the hand. Turns out they’re from Kingsburg Orchards / Flavor Farmer, a family-owned specialty grower of stone fruit in California’s San Joaquin valley. Much as I hate fruit with labels pasted on them, I think I’ll be looking for this place’s products as the season progresses.

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To conclude my 2012 Year in Recipes culinary experiments with a mild adventure, I chose a recipe I’d never used before, for a dish of a kind I’d never made before, with a primary ingredient I’d never cooked before. I made a steamed persimmon pudding.

However traditional they may be, puddings (other than My-T-Fine) were not things my family ate. The only variety I’d ever even heard of was plum pudding, and to me that was something dark and lumpy that came in a can. Imagine, then, my amazement at a recent dinner party, when my friends Betty and Livio served a persimmon pudding that was wonderful: light, gently fruit-sweet, dramatically flamed with brandy, and served with a luscious whipped cream sauce.

We all loved it. Betty, who knows her First Ladies, told me it was Nancy Reagan’s persimmon pudding recipe and assured me it was easy to make. I kind of doubted that, but I decided I wanted it as the dessert for my Christmas Day dinner.

I found the recipe online; here it is. I have to warn you that this is a lousily written recipe. Deciphering it was the first of the series of worries this project presented. It has a few outrageous typos, such as “sold dissolves in warm water” – meaning baking soda dissolved in water – and its entire explanation for cooking the pudding is to “put in a buttered steam-type covered mold and steam two and a half hours.” That’s all very well if you already know how to do it, and no help at all if you don’t. As I’ve explained, I didn’t.

The next worry was finding persimmons, which I’d also never purchased before. Betty recommended the sweet Fuyu type, which are squat and rounded, like little tomatoes – not the more common pointy-ended ones, which I’m told are unbearably tart unless you catch them just as they’re about to dissolve into overripeness. This wasn’t a great year for Fuyus, apparently, because they were hard to find. The ones I finally found looked a little beaten up, but since they were going to be pureed, that was OK.

The pudding mixture was perfectly easy to put together, if calorically terrifying. I dissolved a lot of sugar in a lot of melted butter, then added flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, the persimmon puree, dissolved baking soda, brandy, vanilla, eggs, and raisins. Then came Worry #3: What to put it in (since I didn’t have an actual pudding basin) and exactly how to do the steaming? After checking in many cookbooks and online – several of which gave diametrically opposed instructions – I selected a procedure I hoped would work.

I buttered my largest French metal charlotte mold, put a round of buttered parchment in the bottom, and poured in the pudding mix. Happily, it came only about halfway up the pan, so there’d be room for expansion. I topped the mold with another piece of buttered parchment and a large piece of aluminum foil, anchoring them with a big rubber band.

I set this construction on a rack in my pasta pot, poured in boiling water to come ⅔ of the way up the sides of the mold, covered the pot tightly and let it steam for the required 2½ hours. This had to be done in advance, since I was going to need that pasta pot elsewhere in the Christmas dinner, so Worry #4 was whether the pudding would tolerate cooling and rewarming.

I also made the sauce in advance. This required a raw egg (ooh, salmonella!) to be beaten with melted butter, confectioner’s sugar, and brandy; then whipped heavy cream to be folded in and the sauce to be refrigerated until serving time. Just a light little grace note, eh?

In the evening, as dinner drew to an end, I warmed the still-filled and covered mold in the oven and confronted my final worry: Would the pudding stick in the pan when I tried to unmold it, and/or would it fall apart on the plate?

Magically, it did neither of these. It slid out smoothly, holding its shape perfectly. When I poured on heated brandy and struck a match, it flamed majestically.

And when the flames went out and I sliced and served it with its rich sauce, everyone agreed the dessert was delicious.

I was delighted with the success of my very first classic steamed pudding. Yes, it did turn out to be easy to make, despite all my worries. But I’d still like to think it was a Christmas miracle.

So I wish a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year to all my readers, and I hope you’ll continue visiting my blog in 2013. I received three new cookbooks for Christmas, and I’m eager to try some of their recipes and share the tales with you.

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Just a short post this time, to supplement last week’s report on my first-day-of-autumn dinner party. This is the plum dessert I made for that dinner. I didn’t describe it then because the recipe wasn’t from my own book, whose recipes I was featuring in the meal.

I’ve sung the praises of Italian prune plums here before, and I’m happy to have another thing to do with them that’s equally as good as – and even simpler than – that Plum Cake Cockaigne.

This recipe for Purple Plum Crunch comes from the Fruits volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series. Like all the recipes in that series, this one is credited to another book, The Elegant but Easy Cookbook, by Marian Burros and Lois Levine. I wouldn’t call this recipe elegant – at least, not in the sense of producing a glamorous-looking dish – but it’s certainly easy and quite delicious.

You simply lay quartered prune plums in a buttered baking dish and top them with the crunch ingredients. In this case, unlike any other fruit crunch recipe I’ve seen, there are two crunch layers. First you sprinkle the plums with a dry mixture of brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Top that with a moist mixture of granulated sugar, flour, baking powder, salt, and egg. Finally, drizzle on melted butter and bake until the topping is brown.

It all comes together nicely. The sweet juices of the prune plums permeate the topping and produce a tender, crisp crunch. It’s a resilient dish too: You can make it a whole day in advance and reheat it without any loss of flavor. Leftovers are still good the third day. It loves a scoop of vanilla ice cream, but it’s also perfectly nice by itself. I do love prune plums!

Note: When this post is published, I’ll be in Barcelona, and the week after that I’ll be in Paris. So my next post will appear in mid-October. I’ll hope to discover some new recipes to tell you about in both places.

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