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In the bleak mid-winter, How to Eat is seeking comfort in apple crumble. But with custard or cream? Should other fruit get a look-in? And is dessert wine gilding the lily?
And so here we are, in January, a month as bleak as an interpretative dance production of Threads (musical arrangement, Thom Yorke). You may eke out the stragglers from the Christmas snack stash to console yourself: the sorry Oreos, the orange Matchmakers, the who-bought-these pistachios?, but this is your life now. Work and winter. In Britain. In 2020. Doesn’t feel great, does it?
Which is why, this month, How to Eat – part regular series on how best to enjoy Britain’s favourite foods, part humanitarian outreach programme – is focusing on that most comforting of desserts, apple crumble. Superlative self-care in sweetened fruit and nubbly, buttery topping, the crumble is, for all its seeming inviolability in the Bunterish pantheon of great British puds, a surprisingly new addition to the calorific canon. It may even be an American import of sorts (where it is known as apple crisp), given the earliest print recipes for the crisp-slash-crumble are both found in US cookbooks, in 1924 or 1950, depending on who you Google. Continue reading...