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.
Logically, antecedents existed long before that (the Victorian Delia, Mrs Beeton, was scattering breadcrumbs over baked plums in the 1860s), but, on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears WWII rationing catalysed the crumble’s popularity. With eggs, butter and sugar scarce and flour poor quality, the crumble was a convenient short-cut instead of making a whole pastry case for a fruit pie.
Those make-do-and-mend origins may explain why, by the 1980s, people were swapping the crumble for cornflakes. An idea almost as bad as contemporary attempts to give the crumble a luxe edge by (kill me!) adding nuts, chocolate, coconut or crushed biscuits to the topping. A few oats – this is not muesli! – may, like a pinch of salt or playing with different ratios of various sugars, add depth to the crumble mix. But, fundamentally, the essence of this favourite of everyone from Luciano Pavarotti to Mark Gatiss, is how simply it pivots around two or three flavours. Crumble, as How to Eat (HTE) will now outline, should not be complicated.
The fruit
You would think in an apple crumble (tip: the clue’s in the name), the fruit would be uncontroversial. It’s apples, right? Judiciously sweetened but still-tart cooking apples (eg bramley), with a third of the total softened in a little reduced apple juice and spices before baking to give the filling a fluffy, almost pureed edge around the larger pieces of fruit. Simple. This is no place for sweet golden delicious, pink ladies and gala eating apples. Such varieties are an unpredictable nightmare when cooking. Some disintegrate readily, others retain a firm shape entirely unsuitable in a crumble.
However, home-cooks and anxious chefs, trying too hard to justify their wages, frequently find it impossible to stick to just apples. Blackberries are added, pears, fibrous XXXL rhubarb, raspberries, irretrievably-sour gooseberries. You name it. Someone will throw it in. None of this adds pizzazz. Or maverick new dimensions of flavour. Instead, it invariably creates a muddled meh of fruity confusion where you should be experiencing in pure apply joy.
The worst “twist”, an unforgivable act in fact, is to add raisins to your crumble. In hot food, raisins are an abomination.
Portion control
The unnecessary prettification (prissy-fication?) of food, over-elaborate presentation and/or a neurotic desire to erase any hint of mess or evidence of human fallibility from the plate, is a subject that deserves a PhD’s worth of analysis. Suffice to say, in apple crumble, as in so many things in life, form should follow function … and flavour. Attempts to “style” a crumble are a recipe for disaster.
Individual apple crumbles served in ovenproof pots or tiny ramekin dishes are mistaken on several levels. First, the unpierced crumble will maintain a dangerous temperature far longer than you would ideally want and, second, where do you put the sauce? In a jug? In another bowl? Why do I have to eat some crumble first before I can pour it in?
Even worse, as any chef worth their salt will tell you, are those for-elegant-read-idiotic experiments in deconstructing the apple crumble into its individual components. The crumble’s very appeal lies in its elements melding together as they bake.
It should then be served in such a way that, and preferably in one smooth action, you can scoop up a little sauce, crumble and fruit at the same time. To that end, the only way crumble should ever be presented – aesthetically, think: 1950s farmhouse kitchen – is in great steaming clods in wide, shallow bowls that allow easy access from all angles. Such a rough-and-ready approach embodies the homely vibe you should be looking to convey. Serving your crumble topping-up is preferable, but crumble that in the portioning-out has collapsed on its side is acceptable. Note: clumsily serving it upside down, with the topping at the bottom of the bowl, is taking this aversion to cheffy presentation too far. It smacks of inverted snobbery. Having to dig the crumble out is no fun. It is the best bit.
Sauce
A large dollop of whipped double cream is by far the best accompaniment. You don’t want a sauce that will overwhelm the crumble. You want the crumble topping to stay crispy, not soggy, and in terms of flavour, you want an emollient edge, a lubricating lick of something rich and cooling … yet, ultimately, innocuous. The power dynamic here is not Ant and Dec, Starsky and Hutch, Fabio and Grooverider. The crumble and sauce are not equals. The sauce should never attempt to assert itself as the dominant partner.
Some will agitate for clotted cream over whipped, here. Ignore them. Be honest, clotted cream tastes nauseatingly “off” and has all the dense textural allure of toothpaste. It is hideous stuff.
As for ice-cream, there is something unappetisingly jarring in that contrast between piping hot crumble and freezing ice-cream. The overt grittiness of the last crumble as it sits in melted ice-cream is, moreover, a poor way to end your crumble experience.
Pouring cream suffers from the same issue in the last few mouthfuls. But will you get that far? Single or even double cream can feel oddly “thin” lapping against a robustly muscular apple crumble, while at the same time (unlike whipped cream, which has a lighter, airier profile), use too much of it and its intensely creamy flavour can smother the crumble; its nuances lost in that creamy quagmire. Paradoxically, pouring cream is too thin texturally and too much in its flavour.
Custard strikes HTE as a bizarre go-to in this context (and in many others). A gently cooling sauce is preferable to one that will seal heat into your pudding. No one wants to wait even longer for their crumble to cool to a safe temperature and, in custard’s case, the sauce will begin to form an unedifying skin as you do. That is even before we get to custard’s cloying and often thickly oily texture, not to mention its unpredictable quality.
Like Fray Bentos pies and Heinz tomato soup, any nostalgia you might have for Bird’s custard peters out after a few mouthfuls. It is all a bit vapid. At the other end of the spectrum, when was the last time you ate a posh pouring custard that was smooth as silk and redolent with flavours of fresh yolks and real vanilla? Moons ago, HTE would wager. Is that even desirable? The custard is supposed to be a supporting actor in this heartwarming Sunday-night drama. A brilliant custard will, like cream, shout down the cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, dark sugar and fruit flavours that give a crumble its heady charisma.
A short note on the microwave
Except in an emergency (financial, failed gas supply, abduction by kidnappers demanding crumble in 10 minutes etc.), avoid using the microwave to reheat or, worse, “bake” a crumble. If not exposed to the oven’s radiant heat, your crumble topping will not crisp properly and microwaves are notorious for heating high-water content foods, such as fruit, to extraordinary temperatures that deaden flavour. They do so patchily, too. Microwaved food can range from lethally hot to lukewarm, mouthful-by-mouthful.
When…
… whenever life becomes intolerable.
Drink
Nothing. You don’t need it. Any crumble will be wolfed in minutes. Dehydration is not an issue. Plus, there a several problematic things going on here – tartness, cream, high sugar content – which make it incredibly difficult to pair crumble with drinks, from tea to best bitter, water to cola. A sommelier would point you to dessert wines, but, let’s be real, most stickies suck. You might drink a sweet wine out of curiosity, you might even find it “interesting” (code for: “I’m supposed to like this, actually it’s awful”), but will it become a regular tipple? No. Dessert wine is a lot of expense for little pleasure.
So, apple crumble, how do you eat yours?
