My grandmother wasn’t much of a cook. She could cook and she did cook three meals a day, seven days a week for more than 25 years — from when she got married in October of 1946 to when my Mom, her younger child, went to college, in September of 1971. After that, I imagine she continued to cook at least one or two meals a day for even most of the 70s, so by the time I was born, in the early 80s, she was really done.
The one thing that she continued to do was bake. I remember her making pies when I was little and then, at some point, and I don’t remember when exactly, sometime in the middle of my childhood, she started to make a plum cake.
I had no idea where the recipe came from. I had no idea how she made it. She was particular about buying “Italian plums” when they were in season so that she could make the cake — and to buy extra plums to make cakes to freeze.
By then, my grandfather had fully retired, and so they were traveling a lot, including frequently to Italy and the Mediterranean, and I think I just assumed that it was a recipe that she’d discovered on her travels. I needn’t go on about the cake; it was delicious. The plums would collapse into jammy goodness. The ratio of cake to fruit was perfect. It was what we ate for dessert on Sunday nights after our family dinner for years.
After a long while, sometime in the early 90s, when I was in my early teens, my grandmother announced she had a new dessert. A peach tart that she’d had a party that she’d very much enjoyed. She’d gotten the recipe from the friend of the friend who’d made it and she was very excited for us all to try it.
When she served it, it was terrible and almost inedible. We all tried to politely eat it but it quickly devolved when my Uncle inquired about who specifically had given her the recipe for the new “apple” dessert. My grandmother’s face froze. I jumped in to correct him and defend her, “It’s peach, Uncle D. Can’t you taste the fuzz?” I said.
”They are peeled,” my grandmother said icily and glared at both of us.
This briefly silenced the whole family and we all returned to eating the vanilla ice cream atop the terrible tart. After a few tense moments, my Mother sensed that maybe the door had been cracked. “Who gave you this recipe, Mom?” she asked, “Has she given you any other recipes?”
The way that my mother emphasized “other” sent us all over the edge and even my grandmother laughed.
But she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. She told us how delicious it had been when she’d had it at Sylvia’s and how nice Sylvia’s friend had been on the phone reading it to her. Then she got up to get the card she’d transcribed the recipe to to see what had gone wrong.
My mother who is not much of a baker herself immediately honed in on the last instruction: Bake for 45 minutes at 450 degrees.
“Mom, that cannot be right!?!? Did you bake this for 45 minutes at 450 degrees!!!!!!?????” she asked.
After clarifying with the original author, and adjusting to 35 minutes at 350 degrees, the peach tart replaced the plum cake and became my grandmother’s go-to dessert. We ate it for about decade as well, until the early 2000s, when my grandmother began to suffer from Ahlziemer’s and her ability to bake and follow the the sequential steps of a recipe was lost.
This was just around the time that I started to really teach myself to cook and experiment with recipes and shop for local produce. To the best of my recollection, I saw the small, purple Italian plums at Eastern Market and the cake came flooding back to me.
I bought them and started googling. I knew that it was an “Italian” Plum Cake but that was about it. Fifteen years ago, the internet wasn’t what it is today. The New York Times had a few different c systems of digitized archives, behind different pay walls. The Food Network didn’t make all of the recipes from their shows available online. As Ruth has now explained, Gourmet’s recipes were on Epicurious, sometimes.
I read through a lot of recipes and none seemed exactly right but the best that I could come up with was one of Martha’s, but the texture of the cake was wrong and the ratio of plum-to-cake was wrong no matter how much I increased the amount of plums.
I probably could have asked my grandmother for her recipe but she had forgotten a lot and it had been a long time since she’d last made it. It just didn’t occur to me that would have kept the recipe. Or that if she had, she would be able to find it. I think I may have also doubted that she even would even could remember her baking days at that point. Telling her that she had once been a skilled baker would have just been too sad.
I don’t know why I never asked my grandfather. That’s what really makes no sense looking back. His memory was amazing. He definitely would have remembered the cake. My guess is, it didn’t occur to me that he’d have known where she got the recipe. Regardless, for whatever reason, I never asked him either.
My grandmother passed away in February of 2015 and my grandfather passed away a year later in March of 2016. As we slowly started to clean out their house, I came across my grandmother’s old recipe box that I’d seen on the back counter in the kitchen as a child but that had disappeared and that I’d thought had been thrown away. Flipping through it, there they were, one right after the other, Sylvia’s Peach Tart, and Marion Burros’ Plum Torte.
By then, at least 10 years had passed since I’d first started searching and I’d largely given up and resigned myself to Martha’s recipe. I immediately googled “marion burros’ plum torte.” It was comic and tragic; the great “mystery” was solved. My grandmother’s utterly unique and un-replicable cake is quite literally the most re-published recipe of all time in the NY Times.
It’s quite a testament to my grandmother that a cake that the entire country had been eating was something that I thought was uniquely hers.
Without further ado, here is my extremely minorly tweaked and upsized version of the Marion Burros’ Plum Torte. I like to add the cinnamon to the batter and also the zest of 1 lemon. And, I’ve increased the size to make it in a standard 9x13” rectangular cake pan because whether you are making this for the 1st time or the 100th, I promise, you, it will go quickly.
Ingredients:
225 grams sugar
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
180 grams unbleached all-purpose flour, or a 50:50 mix of unbleached all-purpose flour and whole wheat pastry flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon of kosher salt
Zest of 1 lemon
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 eggs
18-24 pitted purple plums, halved or 18-24 fresh figs, halved
1 tablespoon turbinado sugar and lemon juice for topping
Heat oven to 350 degrees
Cream the sugar and butter and butter and add then lemon zest and 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and continue to mix for about 1 more minute
Add the eggs one at a time — per Dorie’s Dimply Plum Cake instructions, and beat for a minute after each egg goes in
Mix the flour, baking powder, and salt in with a spatula until just incorporated
Spoon the batter into a 9x13” baking pan and place the plum or fig halves skin side up on top of the batter
Sprinkle lightly with turbinado sugar and lemon juice and bake for 40 minutes