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There’s never been such a humble recipe with so much gravitas as the Purple Plum Torte, a tender cake dotted with sunken soft sweet Italian plums. First published in The New York Times in 1983, the recipe, which came from Lois Levine and was written about by Marian Burros, became so wildly popular among Times readers that the paper published it annually for several years running, something they’d never done before or since. When I started working on the first edition of The Essential New York Times Cookbook in 2006, I surveyed Times readers for their favorite recipes, and the plum torte won by a landslide.
What is its secret? What has enabled it to hold up for decades, unscathed by food writers who love to iterate and tweak and transform classics? As I wrote in my book:
