30th May, 2006
Peach Clafoutis
by
I was reading this month’s Martha Stewart magazine and saw the recipes for peach and other fruit clafoutis. I realized that this is actually the stuff my dad used to make, although we called it dad’s cake. Clafouti sounds so much nicer, though.
As we were (and Mom still is) living on the orchard, summer meant being overwhelmed by the huge quantities of suddenly very ripe cherries, plums, apricots, pears, and peaches. So to use some of this fruit, my dad would make a delicious concoction on the stove. He’d mix together an egg, some flour, sugar, cream and butter and put this runny dough into a frying pan, and then put sliced peaches on top. Cooking on a low heat, the batter would form in some places over the fruit, in others the fruit would remain exposed, glistening in butter.
As the pan cooled, I would sneak spoonful after lukewarm spoonful of this custard-like sweet dessert. Sadly, the stove-top cake craze ended abruptly, as most food fads in our house did. My dad would put himself on a diet whenever he felt like he was gaining weight, so stopped making anything tempting. I was then back to my favourite night time snack, a bottle of Tab and a slice of cream cheese. Fall meant a glass of home-made apple cider, but that is another whole topic.
My mom still makes a streusel cake with the waves of ripened fruit that arrives throughout the summer. People adore her apricot version, which is wonderful while slightly warm and topped with whipped cream. Mom’s cake is actually baked in the oven like most cakes, and is a yeast dough. She tops that with whatever fruit is in season, then tops that with crumbs made from butter, sugar and flour.
Last month’s Martha magazine had a wonderful set of recipes around the theme of dreamy desserts. This includes the sort of food I go berserk over, including ile flottante (a meringue), soufflés, anything with custard and gallons of whipping cream. I still shed a fond tear of remembrance over a dessert I had in a small family-run café in Paris, in 1977. I think it was called something like a blanc mange, and was meringue floating in a little pond of custard.
Because yeast can sometimes scare the hell out of a person—me especially—I took my mom and dad’s recipes and combined them. I make the original clafouti base, throw fruit on top, then top that with my mom’s streusel mix (butter, sugar, flour). I bake this in the oven. You then get a custardy, sweet and crusty top, with fruit in the middle type of a dessert. I like to serve it warm, with, you guessed it, lashings of whipped cream.