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Photo: Ali Redmond
Active Time:10 minsTotal Time:55 minsServings:10Jump to Nutrition Facts
Active Time:10 minsTotal Time:55 minsServings:10
Active Time:10 mins
Active Time:
10 mins
Total Time:55 mins
Total Time:
55 mins
Servings:10
Servings:
10
Jump to Nutrition Facts
Jump to recipeAround the time that my father was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), 14 years ago next spring, he started regressing. For instance, one day, he told me that he wasn’t going to eat vegetables anymore. He did this in the sort of insouciant way of the teenaged, and not in the way that one might expect of a 50-something-year-old man. “I’m done with asparagus,” he said, as if someone was trying to force him to eat it.I might have expected this kind of pushback from my maternal grandmother, Molly, who hated vegetables her entire adult life, and who could only be compelled to eat healthily with the promise of chocolate ice cream at the end of a meal (she lived past 90; so much for those predictable health advisories about eating one’s vegetables).But this was my father, the same man who had wanted me to exercise, and who had inevitably gotten me into the sport of competitive running. This was the man who had spooned wheat germ onto cantaloupe for breakfast in the 1990s, who had run 10 miles in the summer mornings before we had shaken ourselves from bed, and who had returned, sinewy and sweaty, only to drip nonchalantly onto his copy of the SundayNew York Times.Courtesy PhotoSomewhere, in the recesses of his childhood memory, my father remembered and favored not wheat germ (who can blame him, really?), but frozen custard from the Jersey Shore, and banana milkshakes, and tooth-shatteringly crisp fried chicken and—to interject one small item of produce (but never a vegetable!), a perfectly ripe plum. As for plums: he looked forward to them even at the end. To him, it was, I think, the embodiment of summer. Maybe it’s because a bad plum can be terrible—too tart and unbalanced, painful to bite into—and a good plum, when you find it, can set right the world.Toward the end of my father’s life, with his ability to chew compromised, he relied on softer foods. You can’t really turn a plum into a milkshake, and a plum has no place in a smoothie, either. But those pliant plums, at their softest and most tender: those I learned to work with. I summoned them in cakes and in the occasional fool.Once he was gone, I thought about plums still. My father was a custard lover, and I know he would have appreciated a sweet reminder of summer that combined both his favorite fruit and a version of his favorite dessert, a delicate baked custard in the form of a clafoutis, set fluffy in the oven.Although plums are mostly considered a summer fruit, they dovetail with fall, which is why Jewish people often eat them at Rosh Hashana, often in cakes (there may be no plum cake more famous around the Jewish High Holy Days than Marian Burros’Original Plum Tortefrom 1983, with its delicate hints of lemon and cinnamon). Rosh Hashana, the new year, requires none of the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, where we starve ourselves to atone for our sins. It also requires none of the categorical difficulty of Passover, our spring holiday, where anything involving flour and yeast is strictly forbidden.Though a plum torte or cake is one of the many traditional desserts offered at the start of the new year (the celebration must be “sweet,” to usher in a sweet start), I actually prefer the clafoutis, which marries many of the ingredients of the torte (eggs, a touch of flour, often butter) with the luscious, end-of-summer/start-of-fall plums that signify the High Holidays.My father would have loved my plum clafoutis, which is, after all, hardly a vegetable, and still light on its feet. The custard brings the plums to the top. You can feel in them the ripeness. It’s what he loved about a good plum: that it was sweet, that it was tender, that it was rare in its perfection and yet, on the day that you happened to encounter it, a slightly tart, complex, violet sunset of a fruit, just waiting to be devoured.
Jump to recipe
Around the time that my father was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), 14 years ago next spring, he started regressing. For instance, one day, he told me that he wasn’t going to eat vegetables anymore. He did this in the sort of insouciant way of the teenaged, and not in the way that one might expect of a 50-something-year-old man. “I’m done with asparagus,” he said, as if someone was trying to force him to eat it.I might have expected this kind of pushback from my maternal grandmother, Molly, who hated vegetables her entire adult life, and who could only be compelled to eat healthily with the promise of chocolate ice cream at the end of a meal (she lived past 90; so much for those predictable health advisories about eating one’s vegetables).But this was my father, the same man who had wanted me to exercise, and who had inevitably gotten me into the sport of competitive running. This was the man who had spooned wheat germ onto cantaloupe for breakfast in the 1990s, who had run 10 miles in the summer mornings before we had shaken ourselves from bed, and who had returned, sinewy and sweaty, only to drip nonchalantly onto his copy of the SundayNew York Times.Courtesy PhotoSomewhere, in the recesses of his childhood memory, my father remembered and favored not wheat germ (who can blame him, really?), but frozen custard from the Jersey Shore, and banana milkshakes, and tooth-shatteringly crisp fried chicken and—to interject one small item of produce (but never a vegetable!), a perfectly ripe plum. As for plums: he looked forward to them even at the end. To him, it was, I think, the embodiment of summer. Maybe it’s because a bad plum can be terrible—too tart and unbalanced, painful to bite into—and a good plum, when you find it, can set right the world.Toward the end of my father’s life, with his ability to chew compromised, he relied on softer foods. You can’t really turn a plum into a milkshake, and a plum has no place in a smoothie, either. But those pliant plums, at their softest and most tender: those I learned to work with. I summoned them in cakes and in the occasional fool.Once he was gone, I thought about plums still. My father was a custard lover, and I know he would have appreciated a sweet reminder of summer that combined both his favorite fruit and a version of his favorite dessert, a delicate baked custard in the form of a clafoutis, set fluffy in the oven.Although plums are mostly considered a summer fruit, they dovetail with fall, which is why Jewish people often eat them at Rosh Hashana, often in cakes (there may be no plum cake more famous around the Jewish High Holy Days than Marian Burros’Original Plum Tortefrom 1983, with its delicate hints of lemon and cinnamon). Rosh Hashana, the new year, requires none of the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, where we starve ourselves to atone for our sins. It also requires none of the categorical difficulty of Passover, our spring holiday, where anything involving flour and yeast is strictly forbidden.Though a plum torte or cake is one of the many traditional desserts offered at the start of the new year (the celebration must be “sweet,” to usher in a sweet start), I actually prefer the clafoutis, which marries many of the ingredients of the torte (eggs, a touch of flour, often butter) with the luscious, end-of-summer/start-of-fall plums that signify the High Holidays.My father would have loved my plum clafoutis, which is, after all, hardly a vegetable, and still light on its feet. The custard brings the plums to the top. You can feel in them the ripeness. It’s what he loved about a good plum: that it was sweet, that it was tender, that it was rare in its perfection and yet, on the day that you happened to encounter it, a slightly tart, complex, violet sunset of a fruit, just waiting to be devoured.
Around the time that my father was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS), 14 years ago next spring, he started regressing. For instance, one day, he told me that he wasn’t going to eat vegetables anymore. He did this in the sort of insouciant way of the teenaged, and not in the way that one might expect of a 50-something-year-old man. “I’m done with asparagus,” he said, as if someone was trying to force him to eat it.
I might have expected this kind of pushback from my maternal grandmother, Molly, who hated vegetables her entire adult life, and who could only be compelled to eat healthily with the promise of chocolate ice cream at the end of a meal (she lived past 90; so much for those predictable health advisories about eating one’s vegetables).
But this was my father, the same man who had wanted me to exercise, and who had inevitably gotten me into the sport of competitive running. This was the man who had spooned wheat germ onto cantaloupe for breakfast in the 1990s, who had run 10 miles in the summer mornings before we had shaken ourselves from bed, and who had returned, sinewy and sweaty, only to drip nonchalantly onto his copy of the SundayNew York Times.
Courtesy Photo
Somewhere, in the recesses of his childhood memory, my father remembered and favored not wheat germ (who can blame him, really?), but frozen custard from the Jersey Shore, and banana milkshakes, and tooth-shatteringly crisp fried chicken and—to interject one small item of produce (but never a vegetable!), a perfectly ripe plum. As for plums: he looked forward to them even at the end. To him, it was, I think, the embodiment of summer. Maybe it’s because a bad plum can be terrible—too tart and unbalanced, painful to bite into—and a good plum, when you find it, can set right the world.
Toward the end of my father’s life, with his ability to chew compromised, he relied on softer foods. You can’t really turn a plum into a milkshake, and a plum has no place in a smoothie, either. But those pliant plums, at their softest and most tender: those I learned to work with. I summoned them in cakes and in the occasional fool.
Once he was gone, I thought about plums still. My father was a custard lover, and I know he would have appreciated a sweet reminder of summer that combined both his favorite fruit and a version of his favorite dessert, a delicate baked custard in the form of a clafoutis, set fluffy in the oven.
Although plums are mostly considered a summer fruit, they dovetail with fall, which is why Jewish people often eat them at Rosh Hashana, often in cakes (there may be no plum cake more famous around the Jewish High Holy Days than Marian Burros’Original Plum Tortefrom 1983, with its delicate hints of lemon and cinnamon). Rosh Hashana, the new year, requires none of the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, where we starve ourselves to atone for our sins. It also requires none of the categorical difficulty of Passover, our spring holiday, where anything involving flour and yeast is strictly forbidden.
Though a plum torte or cake is one of the many traditional desserts offered at the start of the new year (the celebration must be “sweet,” to usher in a sweet start), I actually prefer the clafoutis, which marries many of the ingredients of the torte (eggs, a touch of flour, often butter) with the luscious, end-of-summer/start-of-fall plums that signify the High Holidays.
My father would have loved my plum clafoutis, which is, after all, hardly a vegetable, and still light on its feet. The custard brings the plums to the top. You can feel in them the ripeness. It’s what he loved about a good plum: that it was sweet, that it was tender, that it was rare in its perfection and yet, on the day that you happened to encounter it, a slightly tart, complex, violet sunset of a fruit, just waiting to be devoured.
Cook Mode(Keep screen awake)IngredientsUnsalted butter for pan4large ripe plums (about 1¼ pounds), pitted and quartered4largeeggs, at room temperature1 ¼cupswhole milk½cupgranulated sugar¼cupwhole-wheat flour¼cupwhole-wheat pastry flour1teaspoonvanilla extract½teaspoonalmond extract⅛teaspoonkosher salt1 ½teaspoonsconfectioners' sugar
Cook Mode(Keep screen awake)
Ingredients
Unsalted butter for pan
4large ripe plums (about 1¼ pounds), pitted and quartered
4largeeggs, at room temperature
1 ¼cupswhole milk
½cupgranulated sugar
¼cupwhole-wheat flour
¼cupwhole-wheat pastry flour
1teaspoonvanilla extract
½teaspoonalmond extract
⅛teaspoonkosher salt
1 ½teaspoonsconfectioners' sugar
DirectionsPreheat oven to 375°F. Grease a 9-inch pie pan with unsalted butter.Arrange plums flesh-side up in the prepared pan, placing them as closely together as possible.Combine eggs, milk, sugar, whole-wheat flour, pastry flour, vanilla, almond extract and salt in a large bowl. Whisk until smooth. Pour the batter over the plums.Place the pie pan on a rimmed baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake until the custard is no longer loose in the center when jiggled and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes.Cool on a wire rack for 5 to 10 minutes (it will deflate as it cools) and then dust with confectioners' sugar. Serve warm or at room temperature.Equipment9-inch pie panOriginally appeared: EatingWell.com, September 2022
Directions
Preheat oven to 375°F. Grease a 9-inch pie pan with unsalted butter.Arrange plums flesh-side up in the prepared pan, placing them as closely together as possible.Combine eggs, milk, sugar, whole-wheat flour, pastry flour, vanilla, almond extract and salt in a large bowl. Whisk until smooth. Pour the batter over the plums.Place the pie pan on a rimmed baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake until the custard is no longer loose in the center when jiggled and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes.Cool on a wire rack for 5 to 10 minutes (it will deflate as it cools) and then dust with confectioners' sugar. Serve warm or at room temperature.Equipment9-inch pie pan
Preheat oven to 375°F. Grease a 9-inch pie pan with unsalted butter.
Arrange plums flesh-side up in the prepared pan, placing them as closely together as possible.
Combine eggs, milk, sugar, whole-wheat flour, pastry flour, vanilla, almond extract and salt in a large bowl. Whisk until smooth. Pour the batter over the plums.
Place the pie pan on a rimmed baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake until the custard is no longer loose in the center when jiggled and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, 45 to 50 minutes.
Cool on a wire rack for 5 to 10 minutes (it will deflate as it cools) and then dust with confectioners' sugar. Serve warm or at room temperature.
Equipment
9-inch pie pan
Originally appeared: EatingWell.com, September 2022
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Nutrition Facts(per serving)143Calories4gFat23gCarbs5gProtein
Nutrition Facts(per serving)
- Daily Values (DVs) are the recommended amounts of nutrients to consume each day. Percent Daily Value (%DV) found on nutrition labels tells you how much a serving of a particular food or recipe contributes to each of those total recommended amounts. Per the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the daily value is based on a standard 2,000 calorie diet. Depending on your calorie needs or if you have a health condition, you may need more or less of particular nutrients. (For example, it’s recommended that people following a heart-healthy diet eat less sodium on a daily basis compared to those following a standard diet.)
(-) Information is not currently available for this nutrient. If you are following a special diet for medical reasons, be sure to consult with your primary care provider or a registered dietitian to better understand your personal nutrition needs.
