Desperately Seeking Salem

Plums might just be the ugliest ducklings of my Oregon food adventures. They’ve got that deep purplish color and that leathery skin — kind of like an old lady’s bruised knee — but I’ve been forcing myself to love them.

Why? Because my neighborhood is just swimming in them and I can’t stand the thought of all that food going to waste. In my mind, if E.Z. Orchards is selling plums for a couple dollars a pound, I can’t really ignore the dampened thuds of all of the neighborhood plums falling on the sidewalks and in the grass.

Oh, how difficult it has been for me to love a plum. I don’t particularly like eating them raw — something about the way the flesh clings too greedily to the pit, or falls away in a mush of brown when it gets too ripe, makes me want to spit them across the room.

But like so many other areas of my life, I have decided to follow the example of my German host mother, Sabine, who would whip these babies into what’s called Zwetschkendatschi, or Bavarian plum cake.

Germans eat Kaffee and Kuchen in the afternoon, but their “cake” is generally a little more substantial and nutritious than ours, nothing like the icing-laden trifles we call cake.

So here’s the recipe I’ve been using to try to use up all of these damn plums.

German Plum Cake

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.