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Peach Cobbler
Sift 1 1/2 cups flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. With tips of fingers work into flour 1 tablespoon Crisco, and when well mixed add 1/2 cup milk. Peel and slice 4 peaches, and mix with 3/4 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons melted Crisco. In bottom of baking dish invert a cup, around this arrange peaches, and over all place dough patted out to about 3/4 of an inch in thickness. Bake in moderate oven until crust is brown and peaches are tender. This will require about 40 minutes. The cup keeps dough from lying on fruit and becoming soaked with juice.
A biscuit-topped cobbler from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, with one genuinely useful trick built into it. Everything else is straightforward once the oven temperature and the fat are pinned down.
- The inverted cupThis is the hinge of the recipe, and the book explains it at the end rather than the start. A heatproof teacup or ramekin set upside down in the centre of the dish props the dough clear of the fruit so the underside of the crust does not sit in the juice. Use an ovenproof cup, not a modern thin-walled mug, and lift it out carefully -- it will be very hot and slick with syrup.
- Moderate oven350F to 375F. At 350F the stated 40 minutes is about right for a browned top; at 375F check at 30.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though the modern formulation has been changed to reduce trans fats and is not identical to the 1910s product. Butter or lard can stand in by volume in both the dough and the fruit; butter carries water as well as fat, so expect a little more flavour and a slightly less tender crust.
- Handling the doughThis is a plain biscuit dough with an unusually low fat ratio — one tablespoon to a cup and a half of flour. Work it as little as possible after the milk goes in, and pat rather than roll it to the specified three-quarter inch. It will be soft and a little slack.
- PeachesFour peaches, unspecified as to size, works out at roughly 3 to 4 cups sliced; weighing is more reliable, at about 1 1/2 lb prepared fruit. Very ripe fruit will need less than the 3/4 cup sugar.
- Dish sizeNo size is given. A deep 8-inch round or a 1 1/2-quart baking dish holds this comfortably with room for the cup in the middle. Something too wide will spread the fruit thin and the juices will scorch.
- SaltThe dough contains none. A half teaspoon in the flour is worth adding.
- YieldFour to six servings. Best eaten warm rather than hot, when the juices have thickened slightly, with cream.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which reached the market in 1911 as the first widely sold all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; the cookbook's job was to prove that the new fat could do everything butter and lard did, which is why Crisco appears twice here in a recipe that traditionally needed neither. Cobbler itself is an American dish of British descent, generally traced to the settler practice of covering stewed fruit with whatever dough was to hand when a proper pastry oven was not — the name is usually explained as a reference to the rough, cobbled-together look of the topping, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Inverted cups and, later, pie funnels were used in deep-dish pies to support the crust and vent steam, and the trick here belongs to that family. The book lays out complete daily menus rather than sorting dishes by kind, so a dessert lands wherever the day's dinner put it.