Prune Plums Delight

A few weeks ago I dropped into Alexis, a tiny grocery store on the corner of Montrose and La Crescenta avenues, for a zoulbia. A teatime Persian dessert, zoulbia looks like a fat spider web. Tubes of yeast-leavened batter are swirled into hot oil, forming a round shape about four inches in diameter. After frying, the web is soaked in flavored sugar syrup. The result is a sticky golden beauty that makes your teeth ache. I adore zoulbia.

So far I have not found anyone who makes zoulbia at home, so I don’t know if it’s delicate and breaks easily. We have Norwegian cookie recipes that are so complicated and labor-intensive that you can never buy them in a bakery. I suspect maybe the intensity of zoulbia preparation accounts for the price. Zoulbia is always sold by weight and it’s not a bargain. Nevertheless, I must have it.

Zoulbia is traditionally packaged with bamieh, miniature football-shaped fritters that I feel are the Persian equivalent of dry doughnut holes. I don’t like them.

Alexis’ owner Vahik Alexanian finds my passion for zoulbia quite amusing. He laughs as he opens up plastic boxes and finds just the right zoulbia for me. Vahik weighs it separately and wraps it in waxed paper, so that I don’t have to pay for bamieh, too.

Over the years, Vahik and I have developed a relationship as his mastery of English has grown. I noticed last month that I had purchased the last jar of apricot jam, a tremendous value at $1.99 per pound.

“You’ve got plenty of preserves,” I said, “but this is the last jar of apricot jam. Time to order more. It’s such good jam. “

Vahik nodded. I hoped he understood. Sure enough, the next week the shelves were re-stocked with apricot jam. Alexis has a great selection of jams and preserves, honey, hummus ingredients, the plumpest golden raisins, my favorite brand of lavash along with other fresh Armenian breads.

I can’t go by the produce bins at the front of the store without stopping for some Persian cucumbers or a perfect tomato. Vahik must hand pick the fruits and vegetables. They’re unblemished, ripe and usually well below supermarket prices.

As Vahik was wrapping up my zoulbia, he said, “That is a very fine Italian prune plum.”

I’d chosen two deep, purple-blue prune plums, firm but yielding to a little pressure, no soft spots. They had a characteristic soft gray bloom and no greenness near the stem of the small, oval fruit. Inside the prune’s yellow flesh would be firm, meaty and a bit dry.

I like to eat the fruit in hand, but the Italian prune plum is prized for baking. As it is exposed to heat, the intensity of the flavor increases. Any recipe that calls for firm baking apples can be improved by substituting Italian prune plums.

When Vahik commented on the quality of my prune plums, I had a sudden urge to tell him a story about my years in Europe, why the plums are the harbingers of autumn for me. Instead, I nodded in my turn and kept silent. Other customers were waiting behind me.

In Germany, we used to talk about all the things we’d do when we came home to California. We missed the mountains, our friends and family. We missed Bob’s Big Boy.

The week we left Germany, the leaves began to turn; the nights were cold. I had my last piece of flaumen kuchen, the prune plum cake that appears only once a year, during cooler weeks at summer’s end.

We arrived in California in time for an early October heat wave. We were thrilled to be home after spending our first five years of marriage overseas. It wasn’t until the next autumn that the German dreams began. I began to dream about the snow, the horses plowing the fields, the taste of flaumen kuchen.

After my husband left, as my son grew into a man, the dreams came more often. I went back night after night to the happiest years in my life. I never imagined that I would someday feel homesick for a foreign country, that I would long for hausmacher leberwurst stuffed into salt rolls, for plump ladies selling plumper radishes on market days; for ordering gas by the liter or taking a peculiar pride in having mastered an archaic dialect that marked me as a farm girl.

I didn’t know how to tell Vahik that I eat the prune plums raw, that I can’t make the cake the way I remember it. I don’t know how to explain the mixture of joy and sorrow I feel, when I see my first prune plum of the season.

Alexis Deli and Grocery, 4050 La Crescenta Ave., Suite E, Montrose.

Write Lynn Duvall at boblynn@ix.netcom.com