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| Antoine Vollon: Mound of Butter (1875-1885) |
How could something so vibrant, so luminous ever be called a still-life? The best portrait in the Impressionists show at the Palace of the Legion of Honor (in beautiful San Francisco) is of the Queen of Baking.
I had some peaches yielding so invitingly to the thumb they were screaming to realize their destiny in a sunny galette. (Why not just enjoy them fresh? Well, they were quite small- bought firm, at an excellent price, first to fill the bottom tier of our very large tray, and later to see what might come of them in the course of the week). There is little finer than a rich buttery crumbly pastry crust stained with the sticky thickened juices of ripe fruit. The galette provides lots surface.
The food processor does such short work of making a flaky crust that I don't even mind hauling it out and washing it afterwards. I put in a very scant 2 cups of flour, about 3/4 of a pack of butter (3/4 C- 190 g), a half teaspoon of salt, a large spoonful of sugar, and pulsed until I had pieces of butter the size of a lima bean. Then I drizzled in some ice water mixed with an egg yolk (I find it gives more structure to the galette without taking anything from the tenderness). It was not quite holding together, so I added more, stirring the onions frying in the pan next to me all the while. Then it came together, and what I had was this:
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| Note how it stretches rather than crumbles. alas. |
I've been through this before- baking in haste and distracted- so I know that this sticky mound of dough is unsalvagable. As a pastry dough, that is...
It is upsetting to waste a good amount of butter, not just the (considerable) expense, but the very wrongness of waste, to say nothing of this being my favorite ingredient in anything always. Favorite substance really.
What's in the bowl, unpromising as it now looks, is really very useful- again- that's just under 2 cups of flour, an egg yolk, the 3/4 c of butter, and some water. In short, the makings of most any cake. And what of the peaches? They will stand in for plums in the (actually legendary) Italian plum cake from the New York Times. Why do I say legendary? Because after 4 pages of options I got bored scrolling and just picked my favorite place to get recipes which is Smitten Kitchen because she is wonderful. My mother and I made this when it came out in the New York Times in the 1980's and we loved it and have made it many times since, but I did not quite remember it by heart.
The original recipe- getting its moisture from the juices of the fruit- contains no milk, as other cakes so often do, so the water was a little problematic. Apart from that, having already nearly twice the flour as the original (modestly portioned) recipe calls for, I just scaled up and doubled it, adding:
a little more flour
1/4 C butter
2 teaspoons of baking powder
a little salt
a little less than 2 C of sugar
the leftover egg white plus 3 more eggs.
That gave us the original recipe. As I love almonds with peaches, I added a half cup of ground almonds, tweaked their flavor with some bitter almond essence, and added some lemon zest and some vanilla to round the flavors out. I then spread the batter in my largest pan to the get the highest fruit : cake ratio. This I covered with peaches, halved but with their pretty skins on, and covered the surface with some sliced almonds and some raw brown sugar for sparkle and crunch and sweetness.
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| ready to put in the oven |
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| still warm, a pronounced almond fragrance mingling with the tangy scent of peaches |
As in life, in the kitchen, things often do not go as planned, but they can still be really wonderful.
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