In rural Texas where my mother grew up, there was often no money for the expense of baking a cake, but a pie or cobbler was something easy to make, especially in the summer when fresh fruits were abundant. No matter how hot it was, fruit pies were easily thrown together and didn’t cost nearly as much in time or ingredients as a cake might have.
Pies are a special part of Southern gastronomy: Buttermilk pie, Mississippi mud pie, fruit cobblers and chess pie were all a part of my childhood’s lexicon of sweets. Chess was an east Texas specialty, made from a simple list of eggs, butter and sugar; most often lemon juice was added for a tart kick, and when lemons were scarce or too expensive – as they often were – vinegar was used instead. The name is hotly debated among Southern cooks and historians, either deriving from the English cheese pies in both name and make (drop the final “e” and get “chess”) or possibly from the slurring of the words “just pie,” which is exactly what it is.
The history lesson doesn’t stop with chess. Pies are part of a vast landscape of baking that blankets the American palate. When uncovered, what’s revealed is a combination of the cultural heritage of the immigrant cooks who first settled here, and used what they had on hand while trying to keep their traditions alive. Sometimes, as with chess pie, we’re not entirely sure of the hows or whys.
But if pies are the king of American sweets, then cobblers – and their royal family of slumps, grunts, betties, pandowdies, crisps and the like – are most assuredly the queens. They reign ubiquitous in every region, from New England to California, but especially in the South. “Baking is what truly distinguishes Southern cuisine from other traditions in that home baking is a hallmark, not an afterthought or lesser form of professional baking,” said Nancie McDermott, cookbook author, teacher and writer, and author of “Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, from Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan” (Chronicle Books, 2010). Her latest book, “Fruit: A Savor the South Cookbook” (UNC Press, 2017), collects a dozen of the South’s bountiful locally sourced fruits in 54 recipes.
“In the summer our go-to dessert is neither pie nor cake, but cobbler,” said Virginia Willis, a Georgia native and author of “Bon Appétit, Y’all: Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2008). She is currently in development with WGBH for a series called “Secrets of the Southern Table with Chef Virginia Willis: A Food Lover’s Tour of the Global South,” to air nationally on public television stations. “Cobblers let summer fruit take center stage.”
McDermott, though a North Carolinian, shares my Georgian-Texan heritage of establishing cobbler as basically a deep-dish pie, usually baked in a 9- by 13-inch pan to feed a crowd. My mother (and grandmother) filled a pie crust with fresh fruit stirred with sugar to bring out the juices, sprinkled it with enough flour to thicken once bubbly, then dotted the whole thing with butter. She covered it with a lattice top to show the beauty of the fruit’s color. McDermott “blesses” her cobblers with a dusting of sugar, flour and cinnamon, and covers them with a full mantle of crust. “Lattice tops are beautiful, but you get more crust with a whole sheet of pastry.”
It wasn’t until I taught baking and pastry at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R. I., that I even considered that cobbler could be made differently. The New Englanders I know make cobbler with a biscuit topping – not pie crust – with one thick layer over the top of the fruit baked to a gloriously golden brown.
Slumps are nothing more than biscuit dumplings dropped into a syrupy mass of fruit and sugar while simmering over the stove – so they are boiled, not baked, and this difference lends chewiness to the texture of the biscuit. Though they seem universal, and even hold a place at some Southern tables, my research through The United States Regional Cookbook (a go-to for me, published in 1947 by Halcyon House and an out-of-print birthday gift from my grandmother back in 1972) places them decidedly in the New England pantheon, along with pandowdies, betties and crisps.
Each offers their own Proustian wistfulness to whomever is eating them. I think of a crisp as a decidedly Northern mess of tart apples and streusel topping, made only in the fall, but truthfully, any fresh, ripe fruit can be used. The most modern iteration of the cobbler seems to be the “things with cake batter and fruit,” according to McDermott, where the fruit and batter “magically change places” during baking. For Southern cooks like McDermott – and me – these are delicious, easy, and even fun to make, but they are not cobblers – they are fruit and cake.
Regardless of where you are from, or what version of fruit and pastry defines your gastronomy, everyone can agree that cobblers and their cousins are one of the best ways to let summer’s bounty of peaches, blackberries, blueberries and cherries shine in an easy, inexpensive way to feed a crowd.
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