For decades I was in awe of anyone who made apple crumble, until of course I made one, and discovered that it is one of the easiest puddings to make.
The crumble topping is just a matter of mixing flour, sugar and butter, which in my case has relegated pastry making to the bottom of pudding league table.
And as such it made sense that it should have been invented during the last world war to save on flour.
Or so I thought.
At this stage I must admit I didn’t delve deep into the assertion that it was a war saving recipe, and never bothered to compare the quantities needed for pastry compared to crumble.
Had I done so I might just have questioned that it sat beside Woolton Pie and National Bread as one of those wartime meals.
And here I have to thank Christianna, who commented “Apple crumble was popular during WWII but is is known as Apple Crisp in America and the first recipe in America was published in 1924 well before WWII.
However a recipe for it was in Mrs Beeton dated 1896.
In America the earliest reference to apple crisp in print occurs in 1924, with a recipe in the Everybody's Cook Book: A Comprehensive Manual of Home Cookery, Isabel Ely Lord [Harcout Brace and Company: New York] 1924 (p. 239).
In 1924, apple crisp also makes an appearance in a newspaper article in the Appleton Post Crescent on Tuesday, December 9, 1924 (Appleton, Wisconsin).
Its popularity further spread during World War II, when food rationing limited access to pastry ingredients used for making apple pies”.
Armed with this information I looked again at a variety of recipes for pastry and crumble, and pastry does indeed win out in the contest of which is more economical in its use of flour and fat.
Leaving me just to comment that my crumble recipe comes from the delightful “The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book”, which was published in 1976 and compiled by Jeni Wright.
And long before I discovered Claudia Roden, and the other greats of cookery, this book took me through my first faltering steps in cooking.
Like many of my generation born in the first half of the last century I had the job of cooking for my sisters when mum and dad were out, but as you do as I passed into adolescence and onto adulthood I lost the knack, only wanted to regain the skill in my mid 20s.
So that is it.
Thank you to Christianna for helping redress my historical mistake and to Marks and Spencer’s who I don’t think will mind me reproducing their book published 45 years ago.
Pictures; The St Michael All Colour Cookery Book, Jeni Wright, 1976
Mrs Beeton's recipe was originally published in 1861, she died in 1865. The later works were all of her original recipes in new collections by her husband to keep the brand alive and the income rolling in. Very modern.
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