The taste of summer memories

First, a quick bit of news: At the end of today’s post, you’ll find out about some minor but cool changes to this blog. Okay, back to the post.

Prune plums are in season right now, but they won’t be around for long. That means it’s time for me to get out of the kitchen and let Marion share her luscious plum cake with you, along with a side of summer memories.

 

I remember the warm months of my childhood as a procession of seasonal fruits—first the small soft fruits, strawberries, and raspberries, both also indelibly linked in my mind to various Detroit backyards where my father always kept an assortment of fruit trees and berry bushes, lovingly tended in even the most urban settings. Every fruit was ripe for such a fleeting time, and we were all keenly aware of that little vanishing moment. When the fruits we loved fell ripe, we all went to work, picking, cleaning, canning, and the children of course holding up their end by happily eating. In mid-summer every year we would spend a Sunday scrambling around in trees at an orchard north of Detroit, picking as many sour cherries as we could stand; then for days my mother would imprison herself in the kitchen, where she would heroically can and can and can. Blueberries were later in the summer, when we were up north, and the best ones were the ones we picked in the wild. I particularly remember one warm, remote clearing full of low little twisted bushes that was my parents’ favorite—we would graze around in this warm, still bowl among the birch and pine trees, while my father told tales about a jealous, nervous bear seen in that same clearing just the week before.

These days most produce no longer seems tied to the calendar. Now we can have strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, grapes and even cherries and watermelons and citrus any time of the year.

But prune plums remain obdurately seasonal. Small, dark, slim and even meager in shape, these plums aren’t much to look at, and eating them out of hand is just plain disappointing. But, with their low moisture content and their tiny stones, they are ideal for baking. My mother used to make an upside down cake with them unlike any other I’ve ever had—a luscious, homey recipe now lost to the ages. And they are in season now.

This dessert is in the spirit of my mother’s plum cake—lush, but very simple and direct. It is based on an apple cake recipe by Patricia Wells, who originally got it from “the apple lady,” a Frenchwoman selling the fruits of her family’s orchard in a Paris street market.