Will There Be Enough: American Fruit Desserts

I humbled bragged yesterday on Facebook that I have a special charism for baked American summer fruit desserts and there were some who asked for the actual dessert, and some who asked for the recipe. Personally, I’d rather have everyone just turn up and eat some of whatever it is I’m baking, because I don’t really know how to say what it is that makes all the difference. It’s like the people who can make perfect deviled eggs. They hand you a recipe card, or explain it to you, and then you go home and do it, and you feel very sad. Or when Matt tries to tell me how to make gravy for pork. Whatever it is that he does, and no amount of explaining really helps me to understand, raises the heart and soul into the heavenly realm. Except I suppose we won’t be eating pork in heaven, big sigh.

Where was I? Oh yes. My earliest American Fruit Dessert experiences were in Africa where my father would transform the mundane and ubiquitous mango into cobbler–fruit on the bottom, golden puffy mounds of sugary biscuit on the top. All that’s needed when it comes out of your little gas oven, in the dank dark nights of Africa, is a little cream, but I’m pretty sure we had to settle for milk, probably reconstituted from powder. I expect my mother can remember. So central to my culinary understandings of reality has mango cobbler been, that I still regularly pass over the better, more local options of peaches, nectarines, and plums and buy less good mango and turn them into cobbler for my children, who do get cream, lots and lots of cream, and sometimes for breakfast.

Out of this fertile formative soil was born for me that moment of defining and life changing clarity, The Plum Cobbler. Having survived not one, but two horrific snowbound, shattering Cornell winters, in the late spring of 1999, when it was possible to wander around the Ithaca Farmer’s Market in short sleeves and sandals, I came upon a certain person selling plums, and I bought a large amount, along with a big bundle of flowers. Except, really, as the day went on, it became more than clear that I hadn’t bought enough plumbs. I took them home and made a cobbler, not for one moment imagining that anything supernatural was happening. It baked quietly, the aroma filling my dingy college apartment, and then, by the mercy of God, one of my roomates and I looked into each other’s eyes and knew that we had to take that cobbler and get out of there and go as far away as we could, or all would be lost. We rustled up someone with a car (I’m probably miresmembering the order of things) and drove out to the plantations, and in the dusk, the three of us ate that entire cobbler as if our lives were in peril. The plums, the biscuit–though that is too boring a word to describe what happens between flour, butter, cream transformed into glory when joined together with a perfect moment of fruit–perfectly sweet, just enough tang, the texture and flavor light and perfect. As you can see, words, over the years, have failed me as I have thought of and rememberd that cobbler.

Since then I have learned about crumble, which is always easier, and which can be, in the right spiritual space, just as uplifting as cobbler. You melt a stick of butter and pour it, still hot, over a bowl filled with old fashioned uncooked oats mixed with brown sugar (how much? I don’t know at all. Enough.) and mush it around and watch the sugar and butter blend themselves together. Then you mound it up high on whatever it is that you have. In the winter it is bags of mixed frozen Aldi berries, or grocery store apples. On Tuesday it was my own rhubarb, cut up and layered in the bottom of a heavy glass square baking dish, sprinkled over with brown sugar, and then topped with a sort of custard–two eggs whipped with maybe a quarter cup of brown sugar and then milk drizzled in slowly as you bind it together into a thin almost french toast batter consistency. Then you pour that over the rhubarb and let it mellow while you decapitate and wash a goodly amount of tiny sweet strawberries that your husband has been daily gathering as he walks back and forth to the work, putting them quietly and reverantly in a bowl at the back of the fridge. Those are layered gently over the mellowing rhubarb. This is what it looks like before the crumble.

I didn’t entirely submerge them in the custard (what should it be called? Its not custard, that would be too hot and complicated to work at all afternoon). Then the crumble, mounded high.

Then into the oven at 350 for a while, until it bubbled round the edges and was golden brown. Then it sat on the stove for the night, cooling, and we ate it the next day for supper…you heard that right, that’s what we had for supper. I didn’t bother about anything else. What would be the point?