I have recently been alarmed to learn of the indiscriminateness with which the general public uses the term “cobbler.”
I partially blame Paula Deen, whose ostensible cobbler recipe is the top result when you Google “peach cobbler.” Deen’s recipe is a buckle in disguise: She calls for spooning cooked peaches on top of a thin cake batter and then baking until the batter rises above the fruit.
Southern Living, doing its best BuzzFeed impression, offers us “14 Crazy-Good Fruit Cobblers,” among which are three pandowdy recipes (fruit topped with pie crust), two crisp recipes (fruit topped with streusel), a variation on Deen’s buckle, a fruit bar recipe and a bloody shortcake recipe.
But, you may ask, wouldn’t a clafoutis by any other name taste as sweet? (That’s fruit baked with a crepe-like batter.) Why does it matter?
It matters because words mean things. I do not want to live in a world where common ignorance relegates crisps – a magnificent and important category of dessert in their own right – to another, completely separate category of dessert.
It would be a disgrace if buckles, slumps, pandowdies, and other charmingly named, obscure fruit desserts were lost to history because contemporary Americans can’t be bothered to make a distinction between fruit baked with pie crust and fruit steamed with dumplings.
There’s an astonishing array of different ways to cook fresh fruit, and calling every fruit dessert a “cobbler” obscures the individuality of each of them.
via You’re doing it wrong: Peach cobbler | Food & Drink | NewsObserver.com.
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