SEPTEMBER simply would not feel right without them. And so it was not without a little worry that I kept passing through farmers markets, little fruit stands and even the supermarket without spying even a sign of them.
I suppose it was still a week shy of the season, I told myself. But perhaps it was a bad crop this year and other such fears and anxieties began creeping in. That is the anticipation with which we greet those little gems.
What I am talking about are those blue-purple oval plums.
They mean a great deal to my family. So it was not just with great joy, but also not a little relief, that we found a brown paper bag’s worth on the front porch of my parents home one day.
Agi Fried, the queen of cooking in the community I grew up in in Denver, found them at a farmers market out in Castle Rock, and generously thought of us and had dropped off an abundance of them.
For a moment there, everything felt right in the world. With schoolgirl glee I cried “plum cake! We were finally holding the seasons treasures in our hands, the plums that make September taste like September. Time for our plum days to begin.
My Hungarian bubbe calls them Hungarian plums. She always prepared a warm sugar and spice compote with them.
My mother calls them Italian plums.
I have heard them referred to as sugar plums, French plums, prune plums and purple plums.
I suppose different nationalities want the credit for these tiny gems. I know. More likely, these plum trees just grow in those respective countries.
WHEN I was little and we had just moved from Israel to Denver, to our great delight we discovered a plum tree just a few feet away from our back door, right in our very own backyard.
We plucked the plums as they ripened. For the ones out of our reach at the top of the tree we dragged a ladder to climb and reach them. We filled baskets and baskets of them. We ate them. Baked with them. Enjoyed our holidays with them.
Then we moved back to Israel for a year, and the following season when we returned to Denver, for some mysterious reason the plum tree didnt yield any more fruit.
Some recipes become heirloom recipes. Our familys is the dimpled plum cake my mother bakes. Over the years I have made so many wonderful dishes with this variety of tiny Italian plums, all the more cherished for its fleeting autumn season of one to two weeks.
There is heavenly plum crisp pooled in melted butter, beautifully and deliciously concentric circled plum tart, oozing purple jam, zwetschkenknodels (plum dumplings), and even plums soaked into a plum liqueur to serve as an aperitif.
But it is the rich, buttery crumbly, not too sweet cake-enrobing pitted skin-side-up plums in their utter simplicity, which while baking exude a magenta juiciness and lusciousness, that my mother loves baking, that gets me every time. To me, that cake of hers is the perfect rendering of what the plum cake is, and should be. She got the recipe from a good friend of hers in the early years of her marriage while living in Boston in the 1970s, and has baked this cake every September since.
THIS plum cake is magic.
When you cut and pit the plums in the raw, the plum skins are a deep purple-blue and the flesh inside is almost a lime green or a glowy celadon, yellow green color.
But bake them up in this cake and the plums change color! In the warmth of the oven the plums melt and explode into a jewellike pink-red and out of the oven pops a pale yellow, cinnamon perfumed round cake, steaming and bubbling, with ribbons of bright pink.
By now this fall season plum thing is third-generation in our family. Without my sisters and I speaking about it to each other in advance, it turned out we had each made the plum cake for Rosh Hashanah or Sukkot, or had cooked the warm compote.
Every fall season these plums ground me in September. For me, the holidays are in inextricably linked with them. I see it is not just me, though, but all of us in the family. Some things really do stay with you from when you were growing up, even if it is a sweet cake. Well, especially a sweet cake!
Is there an heirloom recipe you cherish? Or a holiday cake or recipe that a holiday would just simply not feel the same without?
Copyright © 2010 by the Intermountain Jewish News
