A large lunch in late autumn or deep winter, ten people around a huge wooden table. The oven has been on since before breakfast, and most of your cast iron casserole dishes – the three brown Enzo Mari Le Creusets, the giant grey FE, the fallen-leaf Cousances, and the deep-blue Nacco – are all being served from. The adults are leaning back or leaning forward, with layers of wine and food being digested at different speeds; the kids have run through to the bedroom, and are finding new uses for long-lost, newly-recovered toys. Alice suggests tea and coffee not at the very right moment but at the very right second, and everyone shuffles through to the living room, settling on sofas and Poang chairs or sighing onto the rug. White candles are still burning on the mantle; the Franklin stove is opened, a log is placed in, and the vents are flipped so that flames soon roar. Glenn Gould helps set the mood from the corner.

But there is one casserole dish that is still unused: the forest-green Chasseur. It is brought out with vanilla ice cream and green bowls. Someone asks what the difference is between a Streudel and a Streussel; after reading Michael Ruhlman’s From Scratch and adapting its two streusel recipes for household allergies, you explain that a Streudel is pastry while a Streusel is more of a crumble. Expectations so set, heaps are added to the bowls, ice cream melting swiftly into pools; coffee and tea are poured, and a Sunday, 3 p.m. champagne lull is averted.

Ingredients

• Five regular-sized apples (or three Bramley apples)
• 200g sugar
• 115g butter
• 150g flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 75g oats

Take five normal-sized apples, or three giant Bramleys, rinse them, and cut the sides off, discarding the stem and core and leaving the skin on. Then, take the filets (I like thinking of the remaining apple chunks as filets) and cut them into slices, putting them in an enameled cast iron casserole dish. Chunky slices are fine here; when they bake, they sort of liquify, so slicing is actually more about making sure that the skin isn’t in big, plasticy sheets when you eat it.

In a mixing bowl, knead 115g warm butter and 200g sugar together until they are inextricably entangled. From what I can figure, these two ingredients are always mixed first so that the sugar dissolves in the fat and water of the butter, making it easier to add other ingredients later; if you mix the flour and sugar together, then try to add butter, it just takes forever and never seems to get really incorporated. Anyway, mix in 150g of flour and a teaspoon of cinnamon to the butter/sugar mixture. Add 75g of oats (porridge oats are good, but jumbo ones work fine), and mix until you have a uniform mass. Spoon the mixture on top of the apples. The more topping surface area you have at the beginning, the more delicious crunchiness you will have at the end.

Put it in the oven and bake it at 175 degrees Celsius/448 degrees Kelvin for one hour/41.6 .beats. It’s done when you can stick a chopstick all the way through the middle without encountering any real resistance from the apples.

Optional:

• You can squeeze a lemon over the apples to add some tang and acidity. My understanding is that this also prevents the apples from going brown, which is…well, it shouldn’t really be a concern here, as you are covering apples with brown topping and then baking it.
• A few ground cloves or a fresh-shaved nutmeg work well. This is also a good dish to serve with eggnog.
• I feel like raisins would probably be good in the crust. I may try that tomorrow.
• Extremely dark sugar is better, in my opinion, than granulated.
• Vanilla, caramel, or salted caramel ice cream. Or dulce de leche – just put a cup of water and a whole can of condensed milk in an Instant Pot and cook on high pressure for an hour, then let the can cool to room temperature before opening it and spooning some on.