Goodbye strawberries and melons. Hello fall fruits – plums, apples, pears. Fall is nearly upon us, and with it we turn the corner on how we cook if we’re doing the seasonal/local thing. Fall fruits – plums, pears and apples in particular — lend themselves to cobblers and tarts, crumbles, steamed puddings (very British), quick breads and betties (a fruity variation on bread pudding for the uninitiated). All spend a fair amount of time in the oven, a welcome thing when the weather turns cool.
Apples and pears keep longer than summer fruits. Apples, of course, store, which makes them good fresh fruits for winter, and pears can be picked unripe and will ripen in time off the tree, so they are pretty long-lasting in the frig, too. Plums, though, are best picked when ripe or nearly ripe and used fairly quickly, which is not hard when you can add them to salads, stick lots into plum bread pudding* and shove them fresh into a roasting pan around a chicken along with onions and sage and some white wine. Stew some for a quick, nourishing and delicious breakfast with yogurt, an after-school snack topped with granola, or dessert drizzled with cream or enrobed — a favorite food marketing term of years gone by — in custard sauce.
Most of us can easily tick off their favorite fall fruit dessert – Fredrika Teute’s apple cake, plum almond cake, and poached pears with custard sauce in my case — but these three fall fruits are also wonderful additions to meat and fish dishes, a sweet-savory combo with a long history. One of the more well-known historical meat and fruit dishes is plum pudding, which in the 15th century mixed minced meat, suet and dried fruit – but no plums — in a lumpy, gruel-like mushy mix. (Sounds irresistible, doesn’t it?). The ‘plum’ part was the fruit. Historians tell us they called prunes ‘plums’ in those days, a term that eventually encompassed all dried fruit. I’ll buy that, though I wasn’t there despite what my children may think, since the British now refer to all dessert as ‘pudding.’ (The British are fond of speaking in code.).
Apples sauteed with pork chops, hot homemade applesauce with fried chicken, and apples, sauerkraut, onion, and various bits of pork and sausage slow-baked into something akin to a choucroute garni. Pears are great sauteed until caramelized and used as a sauce with brandy and cream over chicken with sauteed mushrooms. For those looking for vegetarian options, there’s always chard stuffed with couscous, garlic and apples, or Rachel Ray’s pumpkin soup with apple relish (link below). And when all else fails, you can put out a plate of fall fruits with cheese (gorgonzola, sharp cheddar, a camembert-type) with a fruit knife a fork and a good port.
* Take a good baguette sliced thick (1 1/2 inches or so) and soaked in good custard – 3 eggs, 2 cups milk, 1/2 cup plum wine, 1/2 cup brown sugar, cinnamon, 1 tsp vanilla –for a couple of hours in a bowl in the frig. In a buttered gratin dish, half-stand these soaked slices on their sides, filling the dish. Stuff plenty of fresh sliced plums into every crevice, pour whatever remains of the custard overtop, then drizzle with melted butter and bake in a 325F oven for about 50 minutes or until golden on top.
Ruby Venison Ragout
4 pounds venison (or beef)
1 cup red wine vinegar
2 cups red Bordeaux
1 tblsp whole black peppercorns
6 juniper berries, crushed
8 cups water
4 cups pearl onions (frozen is easiest)
4 slices bacon
1 stick sweet (unsalted) butter
2 tblsp potato starch or corn starch
1 ½ pounds fresh ripe purple plums, pitted
1 cup beef broth
2 tblsp brown sugar
1 cup dried figs or fresh cut into pieces
2 tblsp red currant jelly (or seedless raspberry in a pinch)
Combine the venison, vinegar, 1 cup of wine, the peppercorns and juniper berries in a large non-reactive bowl. Marinate covered in the refrigerator for 5 hours or more. Drain venison, reserving marinade, and pat dry. Fry bacon in a large heavy casserole to render fat. Remove bacon pieces and reserve. Add 2 tblsp of butter to the fat and heat over high to medium high heat. Add the venison pieces a few at a time and brown, removing the browned pieces to a plate or bowl until all are done. Pour reserved marinade into the casserole and boil for five minutes, scraping up the browned bits [aka the fond] on the bottom. Sprinkle the potato starch on the venison and toss to coat. (If using the corn starch, leave this thickening step until the last few minutes of cooking.). Return venison to casserole. Add remaining 1 cup wine, plums, broth, brown sugar, figs and bacon. Simmer, covered, over low heat stirring occasionally, about 1 ½ hours. Remove cover and stir in the onions and jelly. Simmer uncovered 30 minutes. With a slotted spoon, scoop out the solids and put into a bowl for a moment. Here’s the time you add the corn starch; dissolve it in 2 tblsps of sherry and whisk it into the boiling sauce until the sauce color returns to the luscious ruby-brown of before. Return solids to the casserole. Serve with lots of hot noodles.
Apple-Cheese Muffins
4 tblsp (1/2 stick) sweet butter, softened
½ cup sugar
2 large eggs
1 ½ cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
¾ cup rolled oats
1 large tart apple
2/3 cup grated sharp cheddar
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
¾ cup milk
1 or 2 large tart apples
4 tblsp butter, melted
2 tblsp sugar mixed with 1 tsp cinnamon
Cream 4 tblsp butter and ½ cup sugar together. Add eggs and beat well. Sift together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt and stir into butter-sugar mixture. Stir in oats. Chop tart apple into 1/8-inch dice and add along with cheese and nuts. Gradually stir in milk, mixing lightly. (Rule of thumb when mixing muffins is 50 strokes tops, less is better and a little un-mixed is OK). Fill well-buttered muffin tins 2/3 full. Cut remaining whole apples into 12 thin slices same diameter as the muffin tins; brush slices with melted butter and coat with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Top batter in each muffin tin with 1 apple slice. Sprinkle remaining cinnamon-sugar evenly over muffins. Bake for about 25 minutes.
Poached Pears
Bosc pears work well for this, though you can use Barletts or comice or other firm pear. Just don’t let them be too ripe.
5 fresh pears
1 orange, navel is good since it’s juicy and its skin is zest-filled
1 lemon
1/2 vanilla bean
4 cups water
2/3 cups brown sugar
1 cup apple cider or other fruit juice (or wine if you prefer)
Peel the pears leaving stem intact. You can slice off the bottoms and scoop out the interior if you like, but I don’t since they sometimes get away from me on the stove and collapse more easily without the core. Easy enough to eat them with knife and fork and take out seeds later. Bring water and sugar to a very low simmer until sugar is dissolved. While doing so, add the juice and zest of the orange, ditto the lemon, the cider and the vanilla bean, which has been split and its seeds scraped out into the water. When water is barely simmering, add pears gently, one at a time. Poaching is done very gently, virtually no movement in the water. Poach for 15 or so minutes, or until you can slide a fork into the pears with a little resistance remaining. Gently scoop out the pears and cool. They store well in their liquid, once it’s been cooled, for a week or more. You can usually use the liquid more than once, bringing to a boil each time, and it makes a nice basis — simple syrup — for a cocktail with a little champagne, some Poire Williams or pear brandy, and a dash of angostura bitters.
Bluefish Baked with Apples and Mustard
4 tart apples
4 bluefish or rockfish fillets (about 2 ½ pounds)
3 tblsp sweet butter
1 cup coarse mild mustard
1 cup fish stock or chicken stock (or bullion)
2 cups medium-dry white wine
1 tblsp minced shallots or onion or garlic
Slice apples thin and sauté them in butter until lightly browned. Reserve. Lay fish filets in a shallow baking dish just large enough to hold them in a single layer. Smear mustard evenly over the filets, spread apples over and around fish. Pour stock and enough wine in to come halfway up the sides of their thickness, about a half cup. Put into t 350F oven and bake for 8 minutes. While fish is baking, combine remaining white wine and shallots in a small skillet and reduce to almost nothing. When fish is almost but not quite done, remove from oven. Drain liquid from fish into the wine-shallot reduction and turn heat on full. Cover fish and apples with foil and keep warm while finishing sauce. When liquid is reduced by half, whisk in a couple of tablespoons of cold sweet butter. When butter is incorporated, divide filets onto four plates, spoon apples around them and spoon sauce over top. Serve immediately.
https://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Plum-Pie/Detail.aspx
https://allrecipes.com/recipe/pork-cutlet-with-plums/detail.aspx
https://allrecipes.com/recipe/plum-jam-2/detail.aspx
https://allrecipes.com/recipe/french-orange-poached-pears-poire-avec-orange/detail.aspx
https://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/pear_butter/
https://www.foodnetwork.com/topics/apple/index.html
https://mark-knowles.hubpages.com/hub/Pork-with-Apples-and-Cider
https://www.thetasteoforegon.com/2010/03/pork-and-apple-cider-stew/
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/neelys/apple-crisp-recipe/index.html
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/french-apple-tart-recipe/index.html
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