Cobbler quick and easy, however you make it

By Kathleen Purvis
Knight Ridder News Service

Apples are among popular fruit choices to make a cobbler. Other options include peaches, cherries and blackberries. Gannett News Service Know your cobblers Betty: Fruit and dried bread crumbs layered in a pan; sometimes called a baked pudding. It probably dates to colonial America. Buckle: A single-layer cake made with berries, usually blueberries. Crisp: Fruit covered with a crunchy, crumbly topping. Crumble: English version of an American crisp, with oatmeal in the topping. Grunt: Usually, this is fruit topped with biscuit dough, so the dough stews a little in the fruit juices. It's also called a slump. Pandowdy: Usually made with sliced apples, sweetened and topped with a biscuit batter that gets crumbly. Some sources think the name came from its humble appearance.

Or you can take fruit, toss it with a little flour, sugar and butter, top it with soft biscuits, and bake it. That's a cobbler, too.

Or you can cover any fruit, from peaches to blackberries to cherries, rhubarb or apples, with a thin batter and bake until the topping is puffy. Yep, that's a cobbler, too.

So just what is a cobbler? Even cookbooks that deal with history aren't always sure. Cobblers fall into that category of old American recipes that are meant to be simple and family-style. Just a simple way to throw together fruit, sugar and flour to make a quick dessert.

The name "cobbler" may even refer to that. It was something you just cobbled together from what you had on hand. Perhaps because cobblers were considered so simple, many cookbooks in the 18th and 19th centuries didn't bother to include recipes for them.

The original "cobbler" in the food world wasn't even a dessert. It was a summer drink that mixed fruit juice and sugar with liquor. According to John Mariani's "The Dictionary of American Food & Drink" (Ticknor & Fields, 1983), the earliest recorded reference to that kind of cobbler was in Washington Irving's "Knickerbocker's History of New York" in 1809.

In "Classical Southern Cooking," (Crown, 1995), author Damon Lee Fowler notes that the first time "cobbler" referred to a fruit dessert in a Southern cookbook was in 1839, in Lettice Bryan's "The Kentucky Housewife." The drink had almost disappeared by the mid-1800s, and the name "cobbler" for a fruit dessert was firmly in place by the mid-1860s.

The idea behind a cobbler is simple: Put ripe fruit as close as possible to a sweet crust. Trolling through cookbooks, we found two-level cobblers that put half the dough down into the fruit to stew and more on the top to get crusty. We found biscuit-topped cobblers that let the bottom of the dough soak up juices while the top gets crisp and brown.

We occasionally saw cobblers with a bottom crust, like a pie, but it's far more common to see a cobbler that has only a top crust. And then there are the cake-like cobbler toppings that are thin batters, usually poured on melted butter and topped with fruit. As the batter rises, the fruit sinks.

The kind of fruit in a cobbler is as variable as the type of crust. Peach and blackberry have both earned places at the top of the cobbler heap, but there are recipes for everything from rhubarb to mango. We've even seen cobblers made with sweet potatoes.

If you make a cobbler filling and it looks too juicy — more like fruit soup — you can spoon off a little. But even the juiciest cobblers usually will thicken up some as they cool off. Flour sprinkled on the fruit will do it, and the flour in the pastry will help.

And as far as defining a cobbler, what's a food writer to do?

Only this: Admit that a cobbler is whatever you think it is, which is probably whatever your mother or your grandmother told you it was. And when summer fruit is at its height, a cobbler is a mighty fine thing to consider.

Crust-topped peach cobbler

Serves 6 to 8

Adapted from "Southern Cooking," by S.R. Dull (Gossett & Dunlap, 1968). This version, from the venerable food editor of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, uses pie crust around the sides and on the top.

• About 8 firm peaches
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 unbaked pie crusts
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour, divided
• 2 tablespoons butter, divided

Drop peaches in boiling water for 1 minute; remove with a slotted spoon and drop in ice water. Pull off skins. Cut away from pits and cut into slices. You should have about 6 cups fruit.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place sugar in a saucepan. Add 1/4 cup water and stir to mix. Heat over medium heat until sugar is melted. Increase heat to medium-high and boil for 3 minutes. Stir peaches into the syrup, reduce heat to low and cook just until peaches are tender. (If peaches are very ripe, you can just stir them to coat with syrup and remove from heat.)

Line the sides of an 11-by-7-inch baking dish with crust, letting edges hang over. Put half the peaches in the bottom of the dish. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon flour and dot with 1 tablespoon butter, cut into bits. Cover with remaining fruit, flour and butter. Pour any extra juice from the pan over the fruit.

Pull the crust up over the top, leaving open in the middle and crimping the edges together. Place in oven and bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until crust is lightly brown.

Peach cobbler with clabber biscuits

• 6 cups peeled, pitted and sliced peaches
• 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• Dash of nutmeg and cinnamon

Biscuits:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 4 tablespoons cold butter, cut in pieces
• 3/4 cup plain, nonfat yogurt
• 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream

Adapted from "Biscuits, Spoonbread and Sweet Potato Pie," by Bill Neal (UNC Press, 2003 reissue). When people had access to unpasteurized milk on farms, clabber was a sour, thickened byproduct. These biscuits use yogurt and heavy cream to re-create the flavor. Neal's original recipe added sour cherries or raspberries to the fruit; we skipped them and didn't miss them.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Toss the peaches with flour, sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon. Coat a 13-by-9-inch baking dish with butter. Spread the fruit in the dish.

Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and baking soda into a mixing bowl. Cut in the butter with your fingers or a pastry blender until the flour resembles coarse meal. Stir in the yogurt and cream. Turn the dough onto a lightly floured work surface (it will be sticky) and knead it, folding and pressing together lightly, sprinkling with as little additional flour as possible until it is soft and no longer sticky.

Pat out about 1/2 inch thick and cut into 10 to 12 rounds with a biscuit cutter or drinking glass dipped in flour. Place the biscuits on the fruit. Cut scraps into diamonds and place between the circles.

Bake for about 25 minutes, until the fruit is bubbling and the biscuits are golden brown on top. Serve warm.

Serves 6 to 8.

Two-level peach cobbler

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 cup butter (2 sticks), divided
• Ice water
• 6 cups peaches, sliced, but not peeled
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed

We saw many versions of cobblers that put some of the dough down into the juice to stew, like a dumpling. This version is from "Butter Beans to Blackberries," by Ronni Lundy (North Point Press, 1999), who adapted it from a version she got from singer Emmylou Harris.

Mix the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Cut 1 1/3 sticks of the butter (about 11 tablespoons) into pieces. Work the butter into the flour with your fingers or a pastry blender, until well-blended and crumbly. Stir in ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough begins to hold together. Divide dough into two balls, cover and refrigerate while you prepare the fruit.

Put the peaches, sugars, 2 cups water and 4 tablespoons of the remaining butter in a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring often and watching to keep peaches from boiling over. Remove from heat. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Dust a work surface with flour. Roll one ball of pastry to pie crust thickness, about 1/8 inch thick. Cut into 1-inch-wide strips.

Butter a 13-by-9-inch baking dish with remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Pour half the fruit and some of the juice into the dish. Lay strips of dough across fruit.

Roll out second ball of pastry and cut in strips. Pour the remaining fruit and as much juice as you want into the dish. Criss-cross the top of the fruit with pastry. Bake 45 minutes, until top crust is golden and filling is bubbling. Serve warm.

Serves 8.