Like Its Recipes, "Fruitful" Delivers Sweetly—and With Savor
Fruitful: Sweet and Savoury Fruit Recipes Inspired by Farms, Orchards and Gardens
If, at a farmers’ market, your problem is not your eyes being bigger than your stomach, but your brain’s ability to convince you that of course you can cook 12 quarts of strawberries tonight, no problem!...then the Fruitful therapist may have a prescription for you.
Fruitful, by Sarah Johnson—raised in California, trained at Chez Panisse, and now cooking in London—provides recipes and flavor inspirations both sweet and savory for a wide variety of fruit, including, since this is a British book, some most Americans can’t lay hands on.
But no matter; often, a cook can figure out adequate substitutions, and in others, just enjoy the dream of a day when quince, loganberries, and blackcurrants can all be yours as you move to an 18th-century farmhouse surrounded by acres of wildflowers and luscious fruit. Despite some caveats for an American audience, Fruitful provides reading pleasure and largely unfussy recipes that work.
Chapters group fruit by type, with sweet and savory uses side by side, such as stalks and shrubs (rhubarb, blackcurrant, gooseberry), citrus (lemon, orange, clementine, grapefruit, lime, kumquat) and stone fruit (apricot, cherry, peach, nectarine, plum, damson, greengage). Just those three chapters hint at how many recipes’ main ingredient may be a challenge for U.S. cooks.
Not as much challenge, potentially, as the recipe measurements themselves—wherein cooks must own a decent scale. No quantities are listed by cups, only grams/ounces and milliliters. But a good scale can be had for $25 to $50—well worth it for something cooks will quickly come to rely for its convenience and consistent recipe results.
Also challenging: Many of the recipes require overnight waits. In some cases, that—or at least a several-hour delay—should be expected, such as ice creams and frozen desserts or bread dough. Others may come as an unpleasant surprise midway through preparation. Yes, cooks should always read through a recipe before beginning, but that goes double here: For polenta-olive oil muffins with blackberries, how many cooks would expect an overnight rest to be a requirement? This one at least mentions the rest in the headnote, but makes it sound optional, unlike the recipe instructions. A short recipe for almond cookies calls for a quick whisking of ingredients—and then an overnight chill, with no explanation of the necessity of this.
Throughout the recipes, the fruit takes center stage, unhindered by many other flavors. For bakers who have become accustomed to an almost universal teaspoon of extract in every recipe, vanilla is noticeably absent in most of the book. And sugar is consistently used sparingly, letting natural sweetness shine. Sometimes, even for palates that have become accustomed to lower sugar, recipes may seem to skimp too much. If cooks taste a mixture destined for the freezer and find it barely sweet enough, they may feel tempted to rethink the recipe, as most foods tastes less sweet when frozen (and Fruitful is heavy on frozen items). But resist and be rewarded with fresh, clean, sweet-enough desserts.
Spelt madeleines were the one tested recipe that seemed to miss vanilla or other spicing, but the moist, wheaty cakes made a pleasing base for macerated strawberries. Tested with molasses instead of black treacle, they may have been more bitter than with treacle, but dark brown sugar and honey provided balance. (A note about these recipe tests: ordinarily, I would not make any ingredient substitutions. But I made several substitutions that most American cooks would likely need to make, as noted. Had any of the results come up short in execution or taste, I would have left them out of this review as an unfair test, but none did.)
Polenta muffins needed only blackberries, a hint of lemon, and the crunch of cornmeal to satisfy. Olive oil, an overnight rest of the batter, and 7 blackberries stuffed into the top of each led to tender, very moist muffins (take care to bake these long enough) that last well for several days.
Readers will especially welcome the flavor pairings chart for each fruit, listing what nuts, flower and herbs, spices, other fruits and vegetables, flours, wine and liquor, dairy and meat, and miscellaneous flavors go well with the fruit, as well as a list of favorite combinations with the fruit (such as, for cherries, almond, ricotta, honey, chocolate and amaretto, coconut and rum, or coffee).
A recipe for eiswein (dessert wine made from grapes frozen on the vine) and prosecco set with gelatin looks like it snuck in without editors noticing, given the lack of fresh fruit involved or served alongside. But tested with the suggested alternative of rosé, and set with a best-guess 2 teaspoons of powdered gelatin in place of sheet gelatin, cubes of the simple jelly perked up a typical cheese plate.
For a fun look at how shifting a few ingredients can create kissing-cousin desserts, compare the frozen yogurt parfait to the loganberry semifreddo. A sabayon base of egg yolks and loganberry puree (tested with blackberry puree) folded into softly whipped cream created a creamy, slightly icy, strongly flavored semifreddo. Suggested accompaniments include almond cookies, peaches in syrup, or a berry compote, but this slab held its own, alone. The tangier yogurt parfait (think frozen terrine), on the other hand, needs its pairing with flash-roasted, barely sweetened, pop-on-the-tongue blueberries. Made with yogurt, whipped cream, and a meringue base instead of yolks, the parfait comes out icier and one-dimensional when set against the semifreddo, though less so when made with a strongly flavored honey.
On the savory side (for which fewer recipes were tested during a dramatic heat wave), slow-cooked salmon topped with a rhubarb relish made a quick dinner with great leftovers. Make it with a wild salmon versus an oilier farmed fillet, given the heavy hand with olive oil in the relish, which calls for quick-pickling diced rhubarb in red wine vinegar, a touch of sugar, and a bay leaf, then adding oil, mustard, parsley, and soft herbs (tested with dill). This can create dinner in under an hour if the cook smartly flips the instructions and starts cooking the salmon before beginning the relish.
As the height of summer takes hold, many more recipes beg to be tested—from a simple peach (or mango) and tomato salsa to honey lavender ice cream with syrupy peaches to fig anchoïade. With a gentle, nourishing vibe, Fruitful deserves a bookshelf spot bridging sweet and savory.
Quick takes:
Fruitful: Sweet and Savoury Fruit Recipes Inspired by Farms, Orchards and Gardens, by Sarah Johnson. 251 pages
Photos: Typical rustic garden effect, with lots of roughly hewn wooden tables under gently shadowed plates of food (not included for every recipe).
Organization: By type of fruit, jumbling sweet and savory, occasionally interspersed with farmers’ stories.
Index: Appearing to have been forced to keep to two pages, the index gets only a decent rating. It quickly becomes clear where entries got skipped. If, for example, you can’t recall what that frozen yogurt thing was, you’re out of luck looking under either frozen or yogurt. And don’t bother looking under salmon for the roasted salmon recipe.
The Spice of Life
Everything is better with Pepper
Pepper wanted some of that salmon.
