I cultivate a relationship of deep trust and mutual appreciation with the Fruit Crumble Family. We send each other holiday cards and such, we remember our respective birthdays, and I often turn to them when I’m looking for a simple dessert that won’t keep me busy for half the day, one that will be comforting and reliably tasty. And if it can suffuse the kitchen and living-room with warm golden smells, so much the better.
It’s not the kind of dessert that makes your friends go, “Wow!”; it is the kind of dessert that makes your friend go, “Mmmm!“, and that’s really all that matters to me.
My mother makes a killer apple crumble, she really does. Often dolled up with blackberries, hand-picked and frozen in the early fall, it is always served with home-made crème anglaise in an ageless glass jug, which we unabashedly lick to the last drop once all traces of the crumble have disappeared.
I like to play around with my mother’s recipe, substituting and twisting until the crumble’s head turns.
Her recipe — one of the first I copied in my recipe book years ago — is incredibly simple, calling for equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and breadcrumbs, plus a dash of milk. But try as I might to follow it with exactitude and punctilious precision (and no, I won’t allow you to doubt this assertion), it never comes out quite the same.
So instead of trying to replicate my mother’s crumbles, I just keep my fingers crossed when I go to my parents’ for dinner, hoping that’s what she’ll make. (Then again if it’s a charlotte or a tart or a crème renversée I certainly don’t complain.)
And in my own kitchen, I like to play around with her recipe, substituting and twisting until the crumble’s head turns. In this version I used salted butter and unrefined sugar (as in all my baking), oatmeal in place of breadcrumbs for a crunchier topping, almond powder instead of flour for a subtle nutty taste, and a couple of ripe mangoes, teasing the apples with their smooth flamboyant flesh and suave exoticism.
