The Thrifty Cookbook: 476 Ways to Eat Well With Leftovers (71 page)

Almost any fruit (apart from bananas) can be stewed into a compote with sugar to taste. Adding a sweetly crunchy top turns it into a crumble; swirling it cold into cream transforms it into a fool. Or you could use it to flavour plain yogurt for breakfast. It will keep in the fridge for up to a week and freezes brilliantly.

The general principle is easy. Simply peel, core or stone and dice whatever fruit you want to use. Put it into a heavy-bottomed pan with caster sugar to taste and a scant sprinkling of water (by which I mean a teaspoon or two only). Cook very, very gently until the fruit collapses into a soft, juicy pulp, but watch that it doesn’t catch and burn on the bottom of the pan, stirring occasionally and adding a little more water if it looks very dry.

Try playing with gentle spices or herbs according to the fruit. For instance, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace or rosemary are lovely with apples or pears, vanilla seeds or thyme leaves with summer stone fruit; star anise or mint leaves take pineapple to a new dimension; rhubarb loves ginger and brown sugar and autumn plums like brown sugar too.

All crumbles use stewed fruit as their base but you need only to soften the fruit a little and get the juices running, rather than reduce it to a pulp, or you will lose the bite and body of the dish. Blackberry and apple in combination is, I suppose, the dish of my imaginary desert island, but plain apple comes a close second, along with rhubarb or gooseberries when they’re in season.

It’s best not to over-sweeten the stewed fruit, so that it cuts through the sweetness of the crumble. If you are using apples, always go for cookers – dessert apples rarely have the slightly sour edge you need. Serve crumbles with homemade Custard (
page 33
) or a whirl of whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to balance the heat and the crunch.

Serves 4

600–800g fruit, prepared and just lightly stewed with caster sugar (see
page 235
), so that it softens without entirely losing its shape

For the crumble:

200g plain flour

a pinch of salt

100g unsalted butter from the fridge, diced

100g caster sugar – or muscovado, if you want a deeper, richer flavour

Preheat the oven to 200°C/Gas Mark 6. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl …

… and rub in the butter with your fingertips until they are thoroughly combined and the mixture resembles very fine breadcrumbs.

Stir in the sugar.

Put the stewed fruit into an ovenproof dish and spoon over the crumble.

Bake for 30–40 minutes, until golden and bubbling around the edges.

Use ginger nuts or digestive biscuits
Blitzed into crumbs, biscuits can be used instead of flour and sugar. Mix roughly with the butter to make an alternative crumble.

Add nuts
A handful is enough, chopped roughly to give the crumble crunch. Flaked almonds, walnuts and pecans are particularly nice.

Enrich the crumble
Add a dessertspoon or so of cream – not to make a dough, just to moisten it.

Top the fruit with meringue instead
Follow the meringue recipe on
page 199
and spoon it over the fruit. Bake at 150°C/Gas Mark 2 for 30–40 minutes, until the meringue is colouring and hardening. I like to make these in small ramekins rather than one large dish. Serve hot or cold.