Purple Plum Torte from the The Essential New York Times Cookbook

Amanda Hesser is the author of The Essential New York Times Cookbook. She’s been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade, she’s also the cofounder of food52.com and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two children.

I asked her if she had a favorite recipes from the book and while she had several, she’s shared a Purple Plum Torte recipes from Marian Burros that was so popular, it ran in the New York Times 12 times!

PURPLE PLUM TORTE
This is both the most often published and the most requested recipe in the Times archives. By my count, Marian Burros (who was given the recipe by Lois Levine, with whom Burros wrote Elegant but Easy) ran the recipe in the paper twelve times. And when I asked readers for recipe suggestions for this book, 247 people raved about the torte. The torte happily lives up to its billing: crusty and light, with deep wells of slackened, sugar-glazed plums.

I’ve thought a lot about why this torte struck such a chord with people: the answer, I think, is that it’s a nearly perfect recipe. There are only eight ingredients, all of which, except for the plums, you probably already have in your kitchen. There are just four steps, most of which are one sentence long. You need no special equipment, just a bowl, a wooden spoon, and a pan. The batter is like pancake batter, which most everyone is comfortable making. And baked plums are sweet and tart, making the flavor more complex and memorable than a hard-hitting sweet dessert. It also freezes well.

“A friend who loved the tortes said that in exchange for two, she would let me store as many as I wanted in her freezer,” Burros wrote one year when she ran the recipe. “A week later, she went on vacation for two weeks and her mother stayed with her children. When she returned, my friend called and asked, ‘How many of those tortes did you leave in my freezer?’

“?‘Twenty-four, but two of those were for you.’ “There was a long pause. ‘Well, I guess my mother either ate twelve of them or gave them away.’?”

In later versions of the recipe, Burros cut back the sugar to 3?4 cup—feel free to if you like—and added variations, such as substituting blueberries or apples and cranberries for the plums (I haven’t tried either, but Burros was a fan). She jumped the shark, in my view, though, when she created low-fat variations with mashed bananas and applesauce. While I respect her enthusiasm for innovation, this is one recipe that needs no improvement.