Cooking is a transformation of ingredients. It is often a transformation of texture and flavour but most dramatic when appearance is involved. One of my favourite is Italian prune plum. A bit of heat can take the fruit from deep blue purple to an eye-popping shade of red. This quality endears the Italian prune plum as my fruit of choice for making fruit compote, cobbler, and crisp.
Plums are abundant at the market right now in Ontario with an affordable price tag to match. As much as I love working with this fruit, I’m always a little sad to see them because they are one of the last stone fruit of the season. They are a harbinger of autumn harvest which means the days of lazy hazy summer are numbered. It’s hard not to be wistful. However, being sentimental never stops me from celebrating and I celebrated last weekend with a rustic Spiced Italian Prune Plum Crisp from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course.
Fleming highlighted Italian prune plum’s affinity for warm spices like cardamom and cinnamon. Instead of hitting us over-the-head with spices, her recipe is a study in restraint with only a pinch in the crisp topping. The topping is a classic streusel of flour, walnut, brown and white sugar bind together with melted butter. I made many similar variations the last few months for crumb cake, coffee cake, and of course fruit crisp. What is unusual about this recipe is the lack of thickener for the fruit filling. Most of the time, cornstarch is tossed with sweetened fruit to macerate. During baking, the starch swells and gives the fruit juice a bit of body. The entire lack of thickener here is not without reason though. Plums are naturally rich in pectin so the heat of baking can draw out its thickening property without additional help.
The recipe is intended for a large baking dish but I divided mine into three smaller dishes as usual. You can already see in the photos of the dramatic crimson colour I spoke of. Isn’t it gorgeous? This plum crisp perfectly explains why it is the one dessert I regularly crave and make for myself. The fruit is barely sweetened and baking brings out its mouth-watering tartness. This is all balanced by the crunchy and sweet streusel topping. I’m happy to eat a whole dish by the spoonful but plopping a scoop of vanilla ice-cream on top of warm plum crisp is one of those moments when I’m thankful that I can bake. If decadence is not on the menu, this plum crisp fits right in at the breakfast table. You can add a few spoonfuls to Greek yogurt for a breakfast treat. Or better yet, layer it a few times to make a breakfast parfait! Now who wants to join me for breakfast?
I sang praises for The Last Course more than a few times here but it is unfortunate that this amazing cookbook is out of print. Second hand copies can fetch quite a few pretty pennies. If you want to check out this book, your best option right now is to borrow it from others or your local library. I still remember how it taught me the ins and outs of creating a balanced and intriguing plated dessert using contrasting and/or complementary flavour, texture, temperature, and visual appeal. It is one of the cookbooks that changed me as a cook. For more recipes by Fleming, poke around the epicurious database. She’s a regular contributor.
