Fruit: My Summer Obsession!
Cobblers, jams, fruit salad and pie--or just eating juicy things over the sink!
Growing up and spending the majority of my life in California, I’ve always been spoiled by the abundance of fruit. In the backyard of my childhood home in Palo Alto were three fruit trees: apricot, peach and cherry. For some reason, only the apricot yielded anything worth eating, but boy did it make up for the other two! The fruit on the heavily laden branches ripened in early summer when we children were out of school. When still hard with just a hint of color, the round little balls made terrific missiles in backyard turf wars. In short order, after the globes had turned a deeper shade of yellow-orange and had begun to soften, my mother would fill baskets with the fruit to turn into jars of jam or canned apricot halves floating in sweet syrup.
On Sunday outings we’d stop at farm stands at the side of the road en route to and from the beach in Santa Cruz, or in the Central Valley on the long trek home from our annual vacation at a family camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite. We’d gorge ourselves on slices of watermelon at picnic tables and fill the trunk with cartons of peaches, plums, cherries and nectarines to take with us.
When I asked my brother Denis what he remembered about summer fruit indulgences on vacation, he recalled stopping for fresh-squeezed orange juice at a roadside stand shaped like a giant orange and at another spot for blackberry milkshakes. Our car, like most in the ‘50s, didn’t have air conditioning, so icy drinks would have provided welcome relief after hours on the road. Even with A/C, stopping for a frosty drink on a windy road is irresistible. (With a road trip coming up, I imagine I may be sharing tales of a few such stops with you shortly!)
Although a solitary lemon tree is the only tree yielding any fruit in our yard these days, local farmers markets and groceries are filled with early summer bounty, with the promise of more to come. As with everything else, prices have gone up, but my fruit addiction won’t allow me to pass up the beautiful produce. It also feeds my other addictions: baking and jam-making, but sometimes I just enjoy adding cut up fruit to yogurt or making a giant fruit salad with every fruit in the fridge.
A Fruit Cobbler!
Pies can be demanding, and sometimes I just want an easy dessert. A cobbler, lots of fruit filling covered with a freeform biscuit dough, provides a ready solution. As a goodbye to my Ukrainian friend Olha, who recently moved from California to Washington state with her husband and kids, I made an apricot cobbler with the first apricots I could find. Fruit desserts are Olha’s favorites, though her husband and children prefer chocolate.
I used a recipe for peach cobbler from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book, by the legendary food writer Marion Cunningham, a home cook and native of Los Angeles with a Cinderella-like backstory. She was about 50 when she took a cooking class from James Beard and became his assistant and protégé. She was hired in the late 1970s to revise the original Fanny Farmer Cookbook, written in 1896, which she did in 1979 and 1990. She wrote seven other cookbooks, including her baking book, which I bought at a library sale long ago for $2 and just recently rediscovered. Now I want to make everything in it!
For the cobbler, I subbed fresh, quartered apricots (pits removed, of course) for the peaches, one of the suggested variations. Cobblers of all sorts seem like the solution for folks like me who want something with a bit of crust but don’t want to work too hard to mix and shape it. Doesn’t the name cobbler just sound like something you improvise as you go? After baking my version, I came across an excellent post on the subject by fellow Substacker and baking and Southern cuisine guru Anne Byrn. It includes a recipe for a peach cobbler with a lattice crust that is definitely on my list of future summer baking projects.
A Cobbler Recipe
(adapted slightly from The Fannie Farmer Baking Book)
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
Place peaches—or quartered apricots—in an 8- or 9-inch square baking pan (or comparable pyrex dish that will hold the requisite amount of fruit). Sprinkle the fruit evenly with sugar, drizzle with lemon juice, and dot with the butter. Set aside while you make the topping.
Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a large mixing bowl. Using either a pastry blender, two knives, or your finger tips, work the butter into the flour mixture until the mixture resembles fine, even crumbs.
Slowly add the milk, stirring constantly with a fork until the dough gathers together. On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough 8 to 10 times until it’s fairly smooth. (I admit my dough was rather a rough patchwork, but the finished product, though perhaps not very pretty, made good eating!)
Roll or pat the dough into a shape that will fit the baking dish—it should be no more than 1/2 inch thick, so trim the edges if necessary.
Place the biscuit dough over the prepared fruit in the pan, pressing it into the fruit all around the edges.
For the glaze, drizzle melted butter on top of the dough, then sprinkle with sugar. I put a dusting of cinnamon on as well.
Bake the cobbler for 35 to 45 minutes until the juices are bubbling, the crust is golden brown, and the peaches (or apricots) are tender when you pierce through the crust with a knife.
Remove from the oven and cool for a few minutes on a rack. Serve warm, with iced cream or whipped cream if you like.
Note: Other fruits, like plums, pears or apples can be subbed for the peaches or apricots, with more or less sugar added, depending on the sweetness of the fruit. For apples, Cunningham suggests adding a 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and baking for an hour to tenderize the fruit.
More fruit desserts!
For inspiration for baking with summer fruits, I needed to look no further than some of my favorite bloggers whose recipes will fuel my summer baking spree for months to come. I decided to make Julia Child’s recipe for cherry clafoutis, described in Jolene Handy’s recent Time Travel Kitchen newsletter as “a simple flan-like French dish from the mid-1800’s that’s just as good for breakfast with coffee as it is for dessert with wine or champagne.” I served it to a book group I’m part of and it disappeared rather quickly, though I’d brought neither coffee nor champagne! I’m going to try it with other fruits next!
For those of us who are a bit insecure in our pie practices, it was nice to see a discussion last week on the subject of summer fruit pies that included plenty of tips, recipe links and suggested techniques from Anthony Underwood and Elizabeth Karmel, authors of the“What’s 4 Dinner” newsletter.
Anthony’s favorite pie dough technique for combining some brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, and salt with some hot water to help hydrate pie dough and promote browning is intriguing, though I’m pretty wedded to simple all-butter crusts without any extras. Still, I’m constantly revisiting the butter vs. shortening debate. Here’s a link to an interesting discussion on the King Arthur Baking website.
Other fruit desserts that are on my shortlist include David Lebovitz’s Apricot Cherry Crisp (sometimes, depending on your country of origin, a crisp is called a crumble); Brown Butter Stone Fruit Financiers from “The Boy Who Bakes,” and strawberry shortcake—and a strawberry smoothie—from Vicki Smith’s latest “Easel to Table” newsletter, which offers a fun history of the Osterizer blender.
Jamming
In memory of my mother and that unforgettable apricot tree in our backyard, I just had to make a few jars of apricot jam last week. It wasn’t too hard, just time-consuming and very messy from all the hot sugary apricot syrup that leaked from the stove onto the hardwood floor. Even after mopping the boards several times, my feet are still making annoying sucking noises as I wander about the kitchen. Ah well. Eight half-pint jars from 4 pounds of apricots and about 3 pounds of sugar seems like a small yield for hours of work and sticky floors, but it makes me feel close to Mom, so it’s worth it. Here’s a link to the recipe I used. I also consulted Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, which I highly recommend.
A long time ago, I was inspired to try making jam by my friends Kathy and Scott Zimmerman, who started doing it with their friends at church and seemed to take great pleasure in canning produce donated from backyard overabundance and from fruit they picked in commercial orchards. Canning is another project that can become addictive after a while, especially when you pair it with a different food passion: home-baked bread. After all, you’ve got to have some toast for those dollops of freshly made jam!
Do you have a favorite summer fruit or fruit dessert—or is fruit itself the dessert? I get that. There’s nothing my husband Jeff likes more than a pineapple “boat,” sliced cubes of the fruit served on the rind—the way he remembers it from vacations in Hawaii with his grandparents—and later with me. (Jeff’s edit: “Yes, I love it, but not more than grilled cheese!”)
Fruit is a taste of summer. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Summer plans
A big thank you to new subscribers and old. I’m grateful for all your likes, comments and shares. Please keep them coming. There’s no point to doing this if you aren’t there.
My husband Jeff and I will soon be packing for a road trip that will take us from Los Angeles to the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota and back over a four-week period. Our route will carry us through parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska and Idaho, to several national parks and hopefully down some less-traveled backroads (fingers crossed!). As I mentioned in my previous post, the cooler is riding along, well-stocked with healthy snacks, I hope. Also in the trunk: a couple of sleeping bags, maybe a new tent, flashlights, a road atlas, bug spray, sunscreen and sunglasses, several broad-brim hats and hopefully a reliable rental car to stand up to 3,000-plus miles of road. Have any of you traveled this route or parts of it? I’d love to hear about it.
Of course, there will be a few letters from the road. I hope you’ll be there.
Till then, may the Fourth be with you! Wishing a safe, peaceful and happy holiday to all. I hope everyone will leave the fireworks to the professionals!
Ruth
Shauna Sever in Midwest Made has a recipe for a homemade gelatin with strawberries and /or raspberries and a creamy layer. It is so summery!
Ah the love of a good apricot! In Washington where I live, they are sad and dryish. I discovered the true joy of apricots on my first music tour to the Bay Area. Happened upon a farm-stand and bought a few. As I drove off eating them, I learned I’d need a towel (as bib!) to catch the juicy drips! I’m in search of some before I return to WA on this current CA road trip! If they make it home, I’ll make an apricot cream pie for the 4th! (Based on my grandmothers peach cream pie recipe) Thanks for the inspiration. 🥰