Throwback Thursday: The classic crumble

How simple is the fruit crumble, and how beloved it is. It is perfection in a dessert, yet so simple that anyone can make one. The sweetness of the fruit, the crunch of the topping, and that requisite accompaniment, the custard. Or the vanilla ice cream? Mmmm. Wars have been fought over less.

What goes into the crumble isn’t generally argued about. It needs flour, butter and sugar. Some recipes for it include oats. (Not for me.) Some cooks like to add chopped hard nuts such as almonds or walnuts to a crumble. It needs to be sweetish but not overly sweet; the flavour of the pastry, which inevitably will contain a small degree of saltiness, must come through as well as the sugar.

As for butter, just as when you make shortbread, to substitute margarine would take something away from the desired outcome. A crumble needs butter.

So. The crumble has come out of the oven. Now what? It can be served chilled (crumbles tend to remain crunchy when cold, and the chill gives the fruit filling a nice lift). But they’re even better served warm or even hot, in my opinion, with either custard or ice cream. Or, coming up the hill slowly in third place, plain cream, either whipped or runny.

Some swear by custard, but hot or cold? Heated, custard matches the warmth of the crumble you’ve served fresh from the oven. But how about a thick slice of hot apple crumble served with fridge-cold custard? I love that hot-and-cold combination; for me, it works a bit of magic of its own.

Ditto vanilla ice cream: yes, it does of course start to melt immediately, but the answer to that is to tuck straight into it when served. It takes me back to my late teens and ordering that splendid apple crumble the Spur franchises used to serve with vanilla ice cream.

For me, plain cream adds only richness to a dish that is already plentifully rich. Sure, custard or vanilla ice cream do as well, but for me, they add more than only richness. Their flavours meld with the crumble and its fruit and enhance the experience.

Let’s keep it simple and make a crumble that can be put together in minutes, and contains nothing more than that fine triumvirate of flour, butter and sugar, in the right portions.

(Makes enough for a 23 cm pie dish)

Ingredients

125g butter

½ cup sugar

1 large egg

1 ½ tsp vanilla essence

2 cups cake flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

Method

Preheat the oven to 180℃.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale and fluffy.

Break in the egg and add the vanilla essence. Beat them in with a wooden spoon.

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and stir into the butter-sugar mixture a little at a time until all has been incorporated.

Divide the batter in two, equally.

Grease a 23 cm pie dish with butter and press half of the mixture in. I did not push it up the sides, as I wanted to be able to see the filling from the outside of the glass pie dish I used.

Spread your chosen filling over the base, whether a tin of pie apples mixed with sultanas or raisins, or rhubarb that you’ve stewed with sugar until soft and delicious, or even, as I did this time, about 2 cups of jam. I used, as stated earlier, the red prickly pear jam I had made the week before. You can find my recipe for that here. Red prickly pears are in season, so see if you can wrangle some from a friend in a small town, or check out the farm stalls. You might get lucky.

Take clumps of the dough in your hand and rub it into smaller bits between your fingers while dropping them on top of the filling. Use it all up, nice and evenly.

Bake in the 180℃ oven until golden brown, remove to a wire rack and make that decision as to whether to devour it hot with ice cream, custard or cream, or cool and chill it and serve it cold. That’s entirely your call and nobody else’s business. DM

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Writer 2023, jointly with TGIFood columnist Anna Trapido. Order his book, foodSTUFF, here

Follow Tony Jackman on Instagram @tony_jackman_cooks.

This dish is photographed on a plate by Mervyn Gers Ceramics.