End of Summer Prune Crisp (Yes…Prune. Not Plum!)

Planted as street trees all over Portland in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Italian prunes were as synonymous with this city as the rose is today. By 1927, one source indicates, there were 55,000 acres of Italian prunes growing on farms in Oregon and Clark County, Washington. Despite the efforts of marketing types to rebrand them as plums—prunes being associated with the dried fruit used by elderly folk to aid…um…digestion—they are being grown by farmers all over the state to this day.

I love eating them out of hand and spitting out the pits (yes, I'm still five years old), but I also love them in desserts. The Italian prune crisp pictured above is one of my favorites, plucked, if you will, from my mother's 1950s-era Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook. So simple, it just involves pitting and slicing the fruit, sprinkling it with cinnamon and a mixture of flour, butter and sugar, then popping it the oven. The perfect no-muss, no-fuss, one-pan "modern housewife's" recipe.

Click here for more information on the history of these prunes in Oregon.

Italian Prune Crisp

For the filling:
4-6 c. Italian prunes, pitted and quartered
3/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 c. water or fruit liqueur like cassis, triple sec, etc.

For the topping:
3/4 c. flour
1 c. sugar
1/3 c. butter or margarine

Preheat oven to 350°.

Place fruit in 9" by 12" pyrex baking dish. Sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and salt. Drizzle with water or liqueur.

Put flour, sugar and margarine in bowl of food processor. Pulse until the consistency of cornmeal. (If doing by hand, blend by hand with a metal pastry blender.) Sprinkle evenly over fruit. Bake for 40 min. or until bubbling.

Rhubarb Crisp: A Blast from the Past

"Planning, preparing and serving meals is an art which develops through inspiration and thought. It may look difficult to the beginner, but like driving a car, swimming or anything we learn to do without thought or conscious effort, it is a skill which grows easier with the doing."

Perky, positive phrases like these, along with recipes for "Wheaties Ting-a-Lings," "Hollywood Dunk" and "Veal Supreme"—described as "popular at Sibley Tea House, near the home of an early Minnesota governor"—littered the pages of my mother's 1955 edition of Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book.

Meant to bolster the confidence of a new generation of middle-class housewives like my mother, saddled with preparing three meals a day for a growing family and a husband who spent his days at the office and came home expecting dinner on the table, Betty was always there with her reassuring, confident wisdom.

"Good eating brings happiness two ways. First, there is the joy and satisfaction of eating delicious, well-prepared food. Then there's the buoyant health, vitality and joy of living that comes from a wise choice of foods. Both are important to good nutrition."

Of course, we now know that Betty was an invention of one of the six milling companies that became General Mills in 1928, created for the purpose of responding to recipe requests from customers. The company decided that having a woman's name to sign the return letters would be more personal, and so combined the last name of a retired company executive with the first name "Betty," which they felt was "warm and friendly."

I'm not sure my mother bought the whole ad-speak tone of the cookbook, but both it and her mother's 1944 copy of The Joy of Cooking—which was written by an actual person, Irma Rombauer—were her kitchen workhorses.

One of my mother's favorite "Betty" recipes was for apple crisp, though rather than the granola-esque crumble topping, it had a crunchy sugar topping that contrasted so satisfyingly with the soft, warm fruit under it. I've used it for many different kinds of fruit, most recently for a wonderful rhubarb crisp that brought back vivid memories of my mother's kitchen.

Rhubarb Crisp

4 c. rhubarb, sliced into 1/2" chunks
2 Tbsp. sugar plus 1 c. for the topping
1/4 c. orange liqueur like triple sec, Harlequin or Grand Marnier
1 tsp. cinnamon
3/4 c. flour
1/3 c. frozen butter or margarine, in pieces

In medium mixing bowl, combine rhubarb, 2 Tbsp. sugar and liqueur. Set aside.

For topping, in bowl of food processor combine 1 c. sugar, flour and butter or margarine. Pulse until it is the texture of cornmeal.

Place rhubarb mixture in 9" by 12" baking dish. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Sprinkle with topping mixture from processor. Bake at 350° for 40-50 min. until fruit is bubbly and topping is slightly golden.