Tombé du ciel: Cherry Clafoutis

The cherry custard tart that fell from the heavens.

Abi Knopp
Abi Knopp
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read
Clafoutis is a custardy French cherry tart, and it’s downright heavenly. (photo mine)

There are times in my life when things go so surprisingly well that I find myself glancing over my shoulder in anticipation of an unexpected storm come to wash it all away. Times when everything seems to fall into place a little too well.

I’m sure it’s akin to the feeling that Deb Perelman describes in the recipe for Cherry Clafoutis on her blog, Smitten Kitchen:

Our lives are bursting with pleasant surprises: unexpected windfalls, new and dearer friends, the joy of watching the seasons progress every week I pick up our vegetables from the farm.

We’re expecting our first baby in September, and everything has gone eerily smooth so far. I’ve had a few of the discomforts—loose hips, the occasional sciatic zing, and near-constant Braxton Hicks contractions (I like to think of these as my uterus giving the baby a hug). This may sound like a laundry list of grievances, but I feel as if I’m making off like a bandit.

Now that I’m in the thick of the third trimester, I find myself waking up in the wee hours of each morning. This is an effect of increased cortisol (stress hormones) which prepare the body for labor and birth. I often entertain myself with a little web-surfing, and during this morning’s foray I found a photo of a sizzling cherry clafoutis that inspired me to roll out of bed and raid the larder for ingredients.

Once again, everything fell into place. I was awake and it was 5am. The recipe looked both tantalizing and simple. I had all the ingredients. Rain drizzled from a cool sky after days of heat & humidity. On a rare summer morning such as this, I could welcome the warmth of an oven.

By the time Niall woke, the clafoutis was on the table accompanied by coffee and crème fraîche. I try to rein in my expectations whenever I make a new recipe, but when I took my first bite of thick warm French custard tart all I could think was my god, it’s full of stars. Niall’s reaction wasn’t too different: what did I do to deserve this?

And that’s how I feel about my life as of late. I wanted to write that clafoutis was small-but-good thing from out of the blue, and I found that the French have a similar idiom: tombé du ciel, which means to fall from the sky. But in French it holds another connotation: a gift from the heavens, like that blessed rain that cooled the day and helped to water the fields.

Gathering Paradise

Abi’s blog: food, horticulture, comics, and a life in the Pioneer Valley.

Abi Knopp

Written by

Abi Knopp

Foodie, Emily Dickinson fangirl, new media geek, writer. Northampton, MA

Gathering Paradise

Abi’s blog: food, horticulture, comics, and a life in the Pioneer Valley.

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