Consider this the summer flip of one of my favorite recipes in my third cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Keepers — the apple butterscotch crisp.
Its story begins, as so many of my headnotes do, with a grievance, which is that fruit crisp recipes often don’t work as well as they should, because the nutty oat and brown sugar toppings often overcook or burn before the fruit underneath them has a chance to cook to bubbly pie-like perfection. Many recipes will tell you to simply cover the dish with foil if the crisp is getting too dark too soon, because who wouldn’t want to press a sheet of highly conductive metal over a hot pan in a 400-degree oven? So appealing! My preferred solution is to give the fruit a little lead time by cooking it first, and I often do this on the stove. But as I was sautéing my fruit with some butter and sugar, I realized I was almost making a caramel sauce. So why not actually make one? Once I did that, I was ruined for other crisps — forever.
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