Plum Crumble with Oat Topping

There's a week or two in late summer when the plum trees give up everything at once. The branches sag. The fruit starts dropping. You pick a bowl full and then another, and by the end of the day the kitchen table is covered in them, and you can't quite remember how it happened. This is the pudding for that week.

A crumble is the most forgiving thing you can make. It doesn't care about precise measurements or clever technique. You halve the fruit, rub butter into flour, scatter it over the top and put it in the oven. Forty minutes later the kitchen smells of warm plums and toasted oats, and you've made something that people will remember longer than anything you tried harder at. A recipe is a conversation, not a contract, and this one is practically a shrug.

The oats are what make it. Demerara sugar, rolled oats, a handful of ground almonds for richness. It bakes into a topping that is partly crisp, partly chewy, with those dark, caramelised edges where the plum juice has bubbled up through the crumble and set like jam. I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: plums, oats, August, rain. It still works.

Serve it with cold double cream from a jug, poured generously. Not ice cream, not custard, not unless that's what you have. Cold cream against hot fruit is one of the small, quiet pleasures of British cooking, and there's no improving on it.