Original Plum Torte

I’ve seen a lot of words used around the internet to describe this simple yet tasty plumb torte :

“Original!” “Beloved!” “Fabled.”

I have even seen “infamous”!  Infamous? I have to suspect that the writer didn’t really mean “infamous”, right? This plum torte never stole from anyone did it? This plumb torte never tortured anyone in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, nor did it lead a country into war using falsified evidence of weapons of mass destruction, did it?  It would deserve to be infamous if it had done any one of these things, but this particular torte did not.

It does, however, deserve fame — the good kind. “Original Plumb Torte” has been in my clipping pile for so long that I can’t even remember how it got there. I may have clipped it during one of its annual runs from the Food Section of the New York Times, but I just as likely culled it from the many other times it has appeared in newsprint. It is one of those baking legends that everyone seems to know but me. I Googled it and was astonished to see how many times this cake has been made and referenced. 519,000 results! It turns out the New York Times had run Marian Burros’ famous recipe 13 years in a row in the pages of the New York Times Food Section until one day; she finally got so fed up with the repeated requests that she told her readers just to laminate the damn thing because she wasn’t going to publish it anymore!

I don’t bargain for these kinds of factoids when I Google a recipe! I prefer reading things like “it was a bit too sweet” or “it needed ten extra minutes in the oven” because those are good things to know before you start a recipe! Knowing that this torte was so popular that the fabled New York Times food writer got sick of sharing the recipe had me thinking I was about to eat the Second Coming of Cake, and while it is good, this torte is not That Cake.

Whatever That Cake is. I can safely say that no dessert with only a handful of ingredients that is this simple to make can be considered That Cake — but conversely, I don’t know of any other dessert with this few ingredients that is this good.

Period.

And all I needed was to use a bowl of Italian plumbs that were thismuch away from being “old” to be happy. This torte dispatched them perfectly and elegantly to boot. While you can make this with any stone fruit or even berries, bananas, cherries, or anything, something about the fleshy plum turns magical during the cooking process here. I can’t imagine any other fruit achieving quite the same way. The plum becomes almost jam-like as the puffy, warm batter surrounds it. The light sprinkling of sugar adds some texture and flavor to the top without getting in the way of the delicate flavors of the cake and the plums themselves. Knowing my audience, I omitted the cinnamon in favor of a dash of cardamom tossed into the batter, just enough to be inconspicuous yet somehow present.

I will undoubtedly make This Cake again.

Several times.

Original Plum Torte

If plumbs aren’t your thing but you still want to give this torte a try check using any fruit you have around.  Canned fruit such as cherries (and plums) work too.