Our All-Time Most Requested Recipe Turns 40. Here’s Its Story. (Published 2016) (2024)

“You know what would go great with this coffee? A plum torte. That’s the intro.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Hello, everybody. My name is Vaughn. I am a video journalist for NYT Cooking. And today I’m going to be making one of — I think I say this every time, but this time I really mean it. This is probably the most sacred NYT Cooking recipe. Today I’m going to be making the original plum torte. And I’m going to pick and choose some of my favorite suggestions and amendments from readers. I’m going to make it maybe once, twice more, and have a big plum party after that. So let’s get baking. I’m going to start by preparing my plums just so I have them off to the side. So you use plum halves or really whatever fruit is in season. So this recipe calls for 12 pitted and halved plums. There’s no way that 24 halves of plums are going to fit into this thing. So use your best judgment. If you buy too many plums, that’s not a bad problem to have. So I’m going to just have these, put them off to the side before I get going with my cake batter. Butter goes in. The recipe will say 3/4 to 1 cup sugar. A lot of that depends on how ripe or naturally sweet your fruit is. It won’t change the chemistry of the bake too terribly much if you do 3/4 cup to 1 cup thicker into high gear. Now, in a lot of cake recipes, I would venture to say most types of cake recipes, this is where you would then add your eggs and your vanilla. Here the recipe calls for you to just kind of dump everything in at once. Flour, baking powder, a nice little pinch of salt. I’m going to start on low, just kind of let it go for a minute. You don’t want to over-mix. But I am going to let it kind of get well incorporated. So just use a little offset spatula to kind of smooth it all out. You don’t want to press the plums into the batter itself because there is a lot of leavener in there. It is going to rise. It’s going to puff up. So just kind of nestle the plums. Squeeze some lemon on top and then granulated sugar and some cinnamon, just a whisper. I’m going to put it in the oven for about an hour. The plum torte is a recipe that was published in 1983 and ran every single summer after that from 1983 to 1989. Then in 1990, the editors of ‘The Times’ said, you know what? Enough is enough. We’re going to run this one last time. People were outraged. A lot of people had some very colorful things to say. I have some real fun ones right here. A reader in Tarrytown, New York, said, ‘the? Appearance of the recipe like the torte itself is bittersweet. Summer is leaving. Fall is coming. That’s what your annual recipe is all about. Don’t be grumpy about it.’ ‘Perhaps,’ one New Yorker wrote, ‘it has become the adult version of September’s shiny new notebook for school.’ So it’s a very beloved recipe. And when this recipe went away, people were very sad about it, which is where we get comments like, ‘Who do you think you are? Take your torte and shove it.’ That’s a fun one. Anyway, while my original plum torte bakes, I’m going to do some variations. For this first variation, I’m going to use browned butter. The brown butter is only going to add this enhanced nutty flavor. What I’m going to do is I’m going to put my butter on the stove, wait for those fast, really sputtery bubbles, and then once they start to subside, I know that a lot of the moisture is cooked out of the butter. That’s when it’s becoming more viscous, and the milk solids are starting to brown. And I’m going to actually remove that from the stove top. And I’m going to put it in an ice bath. Stir it around in the ice bath, and then it kind of becomes more of that softened butter consistency that we used for the original recipe. I’m going to zest my lemon before I squeeze it on top. Lemon zest is delicious in a lot of things. I think it’ll pair really nicely with that fruit. A lot of readers suggested that, said it was delicious. And then another big ingredient change-up was instead of the cinnamon on top to do cardamom. So I’m going to use some cardamom. I’m going to use a cast-iron skillet. I think that a cast-iron skillet is something that a lot of people have. Not a lot of people have a springform pan. So we’re going to bake it in here and see how it turns out. Cool. So let’s get going.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Great. She’s ready to go in the oven for an hour. I read a lot about using alternative flours. So for this variation, I’m going to change out a 1/2 cup of the all purpose flour for semolina. I did see that some people had some great success with olive oil for our dairy-free friends out there. So I feel like the semolina and the olive oil is going to give it kind of this Italian countryside. It’s giving ‘Call Me By Your Name.’ It’s giving like Oliver and Elio eating a plum torte by the pool. This is my fantasy plum torte.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Wow. Look at all my children. They look good enough to eat. So let’s cut into them, shall we? Oh, my god. It’s so good. The texture is so great. The sugar on top gives it a little crunch. That cinnamon is like, oh, what is that? Is that cinnamon? And then the plums. This is something that makes the fruit the star. I’m very excited about this one. This is the brown butter with lemon zest, the turbinado sugar on top, and baked in a cast-iron skillet. Holy Moses. Wow. That’s really good. The lemon zest adds this brightness. The brown butter adds this nuttiness. The turbinado sugar on top makes it even crunchier than the original. It’s extremely good. And it baked up really well in the cast iron. O.K., this is our olive oil, semolina one. This is my Italian fantasy plum torte. Wow. That one’s really good. The olive oil really comes through. The semolina adds this really nice bite to the overall texture of everything. And the fruitiness of the olive oil makes this really sing. I kind of love all of them. I think that my ultimate version could be the cast-iron version just because I like brown butter. I like lemon zest. I like turbinado sugar. But this one is also fabulous. And you can never go wrong with the original. The beauty of recipes is that they are living entities that people can and should adapt to their tastes. If there is a recipe in the NYT Cooking database that is meant for people to add their personalities into it, it is this recipe. This is one of those that takes on many lives of its own. And it works with any fruit too. So you can make it year round. It is the perfect recipe. Full stop. That’s it. That’s the video.” [MUSIC PLAYING]