If you’re a person who reads cookbooks as much for stories as recipes, and aspires to an elegantly rural, abundant lifestyle, then Plum Gorgeous by Romney (Nani) Steele will speak to you. If you swoon over gorgeous photos of seasonal fruits set in dreamy tableaux, Plum Gorgeous, with photos by Sara Remington, will send you off into a never-never land of wistful longing.

Steele’s first book, My Nepenthe, a memoir about growing up in the legendary Big Sur restaurant, was a personal account of the author’s relationships with her family and the history of a legendary place. Plum Gorgeous is loosely about Steele’s time living in a mountaintop orchard, but is more meditation than memoir, presenting snippets of observations and memories amidst fragments of poetry and quotations by writers as diverse as Rilke, Mas Masumoto, and Chekov—all interspersed with practical information about different fruit varieties and how to cook with them.

The recipes are from the off-the-cuff, cook-with-what’s-on-hand school of cooking—the type of cooking you imagine happens on a farm or in an orchard, far from the nearest grocery store. The type of cooking that often happens in my own kitchen. I like that I can take an idea from this book and run with it, using what I have on hand, adding my own twist of inspiration, adapting at will.

I was looking for a gluten free seasonal dessert that I could whip up quickly on a weeknight. I chose the cherry clafoutis in Plum Gorgeous. I’m no expert on gluten free baking, so I theorized that a dessert with such a small amount of flour would be a good candidate for a straight up gluten free flour substitution. I subbed rice flour for wheat flour, which worked just fine. I didn’t have any of the called for crème fraîche, so I used sour cream instead. I didn’t measure anything, just eyeballed it all in the midst of preparing supper. I used a hand blender instead of a blender-blender to mix the batter and then I skipped the step where I was supposed to strain it.

Out of sheer laziness and in a rush, I put the raw almonds on top about halfway through cooking instead of toasting them separately. The indignities I inflicted on this recipe should have come back to bite me, but they didn’t. The crepe-like clafoutis batter rose up like a Dutch Baby, encasing the sugared and liquored up cherries in a puffy embrace. The top browned, as it should; the almonds became crisp. I scooped it from the skillet steaming, eggy, and fragrant. It was a hit. I should always be so lucky with my haphazard baking habits.

my cherry clafoutis

cherry clafoutis from the book

The book is filled with similar seasonal fruit recipes that are forgiving, flexible, and uncomplicated. Come for the memoir and stay for recipes like Plum Soup with Basil Ice Cream; Heirloom Tomatoes and Peaches with Burrata; and Kumquats and Toasted Couscous with Halloumi. Or come for the recipes and be drawn into the memoir and photos.

As for the photos, Steele and Remington worked in collaboration on them, and it shows. Steele is a gifted food stylist (she styled the food in DIY Delicious, which the super talented Remington also shot) and together, these two women know how to make a book a work of art.

Blackened organic persimmons for 75 cents a pound vs. around $3 a pound?

Sign me up because I’m making persimmon butter. Bought these from Kaki at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market. They told me the alarming-looking sooty skin wouldn’t affect the fruit and they were right.

This and the galette I’m using it for are the last two recipes for the book. I really wanted both recipes in the book so I’m thankful that Chronicle let me go past deadline until the persimmons came into season. I wavered between using Hachiyas or Fuyus. Fuyus are more readily available and I figured they would behave like apples when turned into butter. Whereas the Hachiyas are lovely to bake into puddings and cakes as long as they are gooey ripe, they can be very tannic when cooked on the stove. I’ve heard that if you freeze them first, that takes care of the problem.

I was also going for an interesting flavor profile so I settled on cinnamon, cardamom, rum, vanilla beans, and lime. Wow. It’s really good. Visions of holiday gifts are now dancing in my head.

Here’s the method:
Peel and cut the fruit into chunks and put it in the food processor. I used about 2 1/2 pounds of persimmons.

Process until smooth and then put it through a potato ricer or food mill if you have one. If you don’t, it won’t make that much difference.

Put the pulp in a heavy enameled cast iron pot and add 2/3 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons maple syrup, a whole cinnamon stick, a whole vanilla bean, split and scraped, and the crushed seeds from one cardamom pod. Cook it down over low heat for at least an hour until it darkens and thickens, stirring occasionally and watching carefully so it doesn’t stick and burn.

Add two tablespoons of white rum and continue to cook for 10 minutes. Add the zest of one lime grated on a microplane. Stir and taste. Cool and refrigerate. I used about 2 1/2 pounds of persimmons and it yielded about 2 cups of persimmon butter.

For the galette, I used about 3/4 of a cup of persimmon butter. I simply spread it on thinly leaving a border and then laid the apples out on top. The dough for the galette was my usual dough from this recipe but instead of all butter, I used 4 tablespoons leaf lard bought from Prather and 3 tablespoons butter. That turned out to be a very good decision. I brushed the apples and crust with a little butter halfway through baking.

This was served in the Headlands kitchen to Eduardo, his baking assistant Megan, and a few people who wandered in. It was a hit.

The rest of the butter is being eaten on toast. Yesterday, I spread a little on a piece of whole wheat toast and added thin slices of gruyere. What a sublime afternoon snack!

I love plums. I really do. Sometimes I have a hard time doing anything with them other than just popping them in my mouth. With the last gasp of summer stone fruit upon us it’s time to do a little simple baking. I’m not much of a baker really, and I prefer uncomplicated fruit desserts. This is my go-to dessert all summer long. When I’m asked to bring a dessert to an event, this is it. I’ll use peaches, apricots, plums, cherries, nectarines, or even a combination.

The cornmeal crust is easy to work with and holds up well to the juicy fruit. It also adds a nice crunch to the final product. Try it with apples or pears in a few weeks. Though I’d add some sweet spices to the fruit. The secret to a flaky crust is to keep the ingredients as cold as possible and don’t over mix the dough.

3 tablespoons yogurt
1/3 cup ice water
1 cup flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon sugar, plus about 1 tablespoon additional for sprinkling on top
1/2 teaspoon salt
7 Tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces and chilled
About 2 large peaches or nectarines, or 4 to 5 plums, or many cherries, or a mixture (pitted and sliced)

Stir together yogurt and water and keep in the freezer while you mix the other ingredients.

Mix together flour, cornmeal, sugar, and salt. Add butter and work in quickly with a pastry blender, leaving some pieces of butter the size of small peas.

Sprinkle the ice water/yogurt mixture over the flour-butter mixture gradually, mixing it in with a fork. Be careful not to over mix. The dough can still be crumbly, but should stick together when pinched. You may not need to use all the yogurt-water mixture.

Gather the dough into a ball, wrap and refrigerate for two hours.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. F.

Roll out dough to a quarter inch thickness and transfer to a baking sheet. Top the dough with sliced fruit, working in a spiral from the inside out, leaving a border of about 2 inches all along the edge of the dough. Fold the edges of the dough inward to encase the fruit, and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 400 degrees until the crust is brown and flaky and the fruit soft, bubbling and fragrant, about 15 to 20 minutes.