Create delicious crumbles

Origins
Although crumble has been around as long as our grandmothers and great grandmothers can remember, there are no such recipes in old English cookbooks. They only began to appear in print in the twentieth century and it seems likely that crumble really came on to the scene during World War II.

A crumble topping uses basically the same ingredients as pastry – flour, butter, sugar and sometimes spice – but is much simpler to make. (During wartime when butter was in short supply, cooks had to use whatever was available.)

It’s possible that the great British crumble is a derivative of Streusel, a sweet topping for tea breads and cakes originating in Austria and Central Europe and almost always containing ground cinnamon. Streusel comes from the German word streusen, to scatter, which is also how we apply our crumbly topping to fruit. Streusel has more sugar in relation to flour than crumble, and the result is a crisper (and naturally sweeter) topping. The Americans also have a version of a fruit-crusted pie called cobbler. The cobbler topping is sometimes used for meat stews as well as fruit.