Anderson - Crisps, Cobblers, Custards & Creams

Copyright 2016 by Jean Anderson

Interior photography 2016 by Jason Wyche

All rights reserved.

Food styling by Chelsea Zimmer

Prop styling by Kira Corbin

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permission@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Jean.

Crisps, cobblers, custards & creams / by Jean Anderson ; photography by Jason Wyche.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-544-23075-0 (paper over board)

ISBN 978-0-544-23076-7 (ebook)

1. Desserts. I. Title. II. Title: Crisps, cobblers, custards & creams.

TX773.A4226 2016

641.86dc23

2015019992

Book design by Shubhani Sarkar

v1.0416

The DoubledayCookbook (with Elaine Hanna)

Winner, R.T. French Tastemaker Award, Best Basic Cookbook (1975) as well as Cookbook of the Year (1975)

The FamilyCircleCookbook (with the Food Editors of FamilyCircle)

Half aCan ofTomato Paste & OtherCulinaryDilemmas
(with Ruth Buchan)

Winner, Seagram/International Association of Culinary Professionals Award, Best Specialty Cookbook of the Year (1980)

The New DoubledayCookbook (with Elaine Hanna)

The Food of Portugal

Winner, Seagram/International Association of Culinary Professionals Award, Best Foreign Cookbook of the Year (1986)

The New GermanCookbook (with Hedy Wrz)

The AmericanCenturyCookbook

Good Morning AmericaCut the Calories Cookbook
(co-edited with Sara Moulton)

Process This!

Winner, James Beard Cookbook Awards, Best Cookbook, Tools & Techniques Category (2003)

Quick Loaves

A Love Affair with SouthernCooking

Winner, James Beard Cookbook Awards, Best Cookbook, Americana Category (2008)

Falling Off the Bone

From a Southern Oven

Mad for Muffins

For all lovers of crisps, cobblers, custards & creams.

First of all, deepest thanks to New York friend and colleague Joanne Lamb Hayes for a heroic assist in developing and testing recipes for this book. No one is more professional than Joanne, more painstaking, or more knowledgeable thanks to her experience in the test kitchens of major magazines (McCalls and Family Circle) not to mention her fifteen years as Food Editor of Country Living.

For sharing pudding ideas, revered family recipes, and ingredient sources, I owe a debt of gratitude to these friends, colleagues, and relatives: Luis Abilio, Judy Berek, Sylvia Carter, Barbara Fairchild, Barbara Gillam, Sandra Gutierrez, Enca Mello Lameiro, Ronni Lundy, Dea Martin, Sally Massengale, Mike Moore, Sara Moulton, Moreton Neal, Lisa Prince, Bill Smith (extra thanks to you, Bill, for sharing your precious wild persimmon pulp), Kathy McDonald Snead, Brenda Sutton, Dotty Tookey, Betsy Wade, Andrea Weigl, and Susan OHaver Young.

Id be remiss if I didnt thank my eagle-eyed friend Margaretta Yarborough who reads proof after Ive had a go at it and invariably catches typos I missed. Thanks, too, to Robert Holmes, friend and hobby cook both accomplished and devout, wholl try a just-tested recipe and let me know what he thinks.

A big salute to my editor, Justin Schwartz, who has now shepherded four of my cookbooks into print with grace, patience, style, and skill.

Finally, ongoing thanks to my agent David Black who, no matter how busy, always takes time to listen and advise. You are the best, David, my rock and voice of reason in todays increasingly iffy world of book publishing.

Soothing, nourishing, uplifting, puddings are quintessential comfort food. But what exactly is a pudding? Merriam-Webster gives three definitions: (1) a thick, sweet, soft, and creamy food that is usually eaten cold at the end of a meal... (2) a sweet, soft food that is made of rice, bread, etc.... or (3) a hot dish like a pie that has a mixture of meat or vegetables inside of it.

In my own family, and in my corner of the South, puddings included Websters first two definitions as well as a fruit-based version of the third. And these are the puddings you will find in the pages that follow.

As toddlers, cool and creamy is what we cravedcustards, cornstarch puddings, and gelatins whipped into fluffs. But before long wed graduated to crisps and cobblers, then bread puddings, then sophisticated charlottes and crme caramels.

My mother made them all and welcomed me into her kitchen when I was barely tall enough to see into her mixing bowl. Soon I was lending a handbuttering pans and casseroles, crumbling bread for toppings, and of course licking the bowl.

I remember picking the blueberries and rhubarb my father grew, all the while dreaming of the cobblers, crisps, and crumbles to come. I remember dodging brambles when asked to gather blackberries, also racing into the woods after first frost to scoop up wild persimmon windfalls before the raccoons and deer could devour them. Not easy.

Early each summer, wed pile into the family Ford and drive an hour or so down U.S. Highway 1 to the Sandhills, where peach orchards rippled across every horizon. Then come autumn, wed head for the nearest apple orchard and pick a bushel or more. I still like to pick my own. Or buy at my farmers market because no fruits shipped across the country, let alone across the world, can match the home-grown for succulence and flavor.

My mother loved to improvise with the pudding recipes shed picked up at her book club and sewing circle as well as the North Carolina State College Womans Club and AAUW. These meetings, it seemed to me, were mostly recipe swaps. I now have the foot-long metal card file my mother filled with recipes, each one neatly written on a three-by-five index card with source and date noted in the upper right-hand corner. Whenever Mother hosted one of her club meetings, I played fly on the wall just so I could listen in on discussions that nearly always focused on food, particularly desserts.

When I began working on this book, I e-mailed friends, relatives, and colleagues to ask if theyd be willing to share a cherished family pudding recipe or two, and was startled to learn how many of them admitted to having grown up on instant puddings and Jell-O. Really?