Another Julia Child favorite from long ago -- clafouti, a rustic fruit dessert. The dish originated in the French province of Limousin, due south of Paris. The standard clafouti usually has cherries, and in fact, the name of the recipe (p. 655) is "Clafouti: Cherry Flan."Of course I am using a peck of peaches this week. There's no peach version in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, so I followed the variant for plums, which behave pretty much like peaches in cakes and the like. The liqueur in which I soaked the peaches was Amaretto, and I added a few lavender buds as I've read it's good to do with peach desserts. (They unfortunately look a bit like small insects. But they aren't.)
Clafouti batter bakes up to be halfway between a cake and a custard. The result tonight was delicious. However, it doesn't photograph very well, as it's a little sloppy looking. At least you can see that I sifted powdered sugar on it successfully.
Clafouti is not one of the Julia Child recipes that I've made over and over, though I do remember making it soon after I got the cookbook. I served it to some friends who came to dinner in our first student apartment in Berkeley. "Clafouti?" said our guest, "is there also Clafou-coffee?"
It was very exotic to make such a thing.
I absolutely love clafouti, but it's not a favorite of the rest of my family, so I only make it rarely. I also rarely make it with cherries, even though that's the norm. I haven't tried peaches, but it sounds like a delicious variant!
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