Plum Pudding

My parents left at 5am this morning for the airport in Nice. It was a really great visit, and in the last ten days, Augustin has acquired a jumble of new English words: book, boat, red, turtle, moo, plum.

Plums irk me. Something about the raw texture, the slightly acidic density, makes me feel like I’m biting into a juicy baseball. But the abundance of the Provencal seasons doesn’t leave a lot of room for free will. This month, it’s all plums, all the time.

Back from ten days on the beach, Mr. C found his plum tree groaning with fruit, he only had to shake the branches to fill his cardboard cagettes and a rectangular green plastic basket, which very generously ended up in my kitchen.

We have a new chest freezer in the cellar. I briefly considered tossing the whole lot in a Ziploc bag, thus shoving the issue downstream a few months. But another idea presented itself, inspired, of all things, by trips I used to take with my mother to a wholesale market in Paterson, NJ. We would buy crates of slightly overripe peaches and plums and come home and make compote. The details are fuzzy, for both of us. My mother was always an unreliable narrator, and with my grandmother gone, I’m starting to realize how much is being lost, everyday. As a writer, this terrifies me. I feel I should have started recording long ago. Why didn’t I know that my great grandmother Rose was a milliner? Or that my great grandfather Eddie entered the Jewish mafia by way of a milk truck?

G.’s grandmother passed away this week. There weren’t many good memories – they were hard people, not particularly open to the wider aspirations of their children or grandchildren. It’s hard to know how to mark such occasions, people disappear, and all we have left are the stories. He remembers the way she used to spend the whole morning painstakingly shelling crabs to make him a tartine of bread and butter with the crab on top. A whole morning’s work devoured in a single minute. He remembers picking blackberries for her jam. Two for him, one for the pot. The smell of burnt coffee, sitting all morning over a low flame on the stove. He remembers the meticulous rows of their vegetable garden (like Mr. C, G’s grandparents demanded a certain precision in their beans), and the tiny, rock-hard yellow apples from their tree.

Unlike me, mother loves plums. That fact, and some leftover red wine lead to a fruitful development. I roasted the plums in a medium oven with the wine, a spilt vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick and the tiniest bit of sugar. The plums gave way, exchanging their springiness for a comforting sag. The wine turned into a spiced burgundy syrup, rich and glossy as a stained glass window. I served it with faisselle, a mild fresh cheese, though I sense that sour cream, Greek yogurt or mascarpone wouldn’t go amiss.
We are living in a golden time: when our son is so little I can protect him simply by closing the front gate, and our parents are well enough to sit at lunch on a sunny terrace and watch Augustin get whipped cream all over his face and into his blond hair. I don’t know what kind food should mark that very simple gift. Something warm and sweet is a good start.
Plums roasted with red wine, cinnamon and vanilla

3 pounds of plums
½ cup full bodied red wine
1 tbsp turbinado (raw cane) sugar
1 cinnamon stick
1 small vanilla bean, or ½ of a large vanilla bean, split down the middle
Preheat the oven to 350F.

Halve the plums, remove the pits. In a 9x13 casserole, combine plums and all the other ingredients. Roast for 35 to 45 minutes, until tender.

Serve warm or at room temperature with sour cream, yogurt or lightly sweetened mascarpone.

Serves 8.