Plum Cobbler
Take one quart of flour, four table-spoons melted lard, half teaspoon salt, two tea-spoons baking-powder; mix as for biscuit, with either sweet milk or water, roll thin, and line a pudding-dish or dripping-pan, nine by eighteen inches; mix three table-spoons flour and two of sugar together, and sprinkle over the crust; then pour in three pints canned damson plums, and sprinkle over them one coffee-cup sugar; wet the edges with a little flour and water mixed, put on upper crust, press the edges together, make two openings by cutting two incisions at right angles an inch in length, and bake in a quick oven half an hour. Peaches, apples, or any kind of fresh or canned fruit, can be made in the same wav. -Miss S. Alice Melching.
A biscuit-dough double crust over canned plums, baked in a sheet pan rather than a pie plate. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures are period shorthand.
- Quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: a quart is roughly 4 cups, about a pound. Flour of the period was likely softer than modern all-purpose, so the dough may come out slightly firmer; a tablespoon or two more milk brings it right.
- Coffee-cup of sugarA coffee-cup in this book is about a cup, 7 to 8 oz. Damsons are sharply acid, which is why the sugar is generous; sweeter plums want less.
- A quick ovenA hot oven, usually reckoned at around 400-425F; the book gives no temperatures. The crust is a biscuit dough and needs the heat to set before the fruit juice soaks it. Half an hour at that heat is about right for a shallow pan; look for a browned top and juice bubbling through the vents.
- The flour-and-sugar layerThe three tablespoons flour and two of sugar sprinkled on the bottom crust are the thickener, and the reason the base does not go to paste. Do not skip it, and do not stir it into the fruit instead.
- Three pints canned plumsSix cups. The recipe does not say to drain them, though pouring off most of the syrup helps keep the base from flooding. Modern canned plums in heavy syrup are much sweeter than home-canned damsons; taste before adding the full cup of sugar, and if using fresh plums allow for the extra juice they throw.
- DamsonsA small, oval, very tart blue-black plum, still grown but rarely in supermarkets. Italian prune plums are the closest easy substitute; they are sweeter, so cut the sugar by a third.
- The panNine by eighteen inches is larger than a standard quarter-sheet pan (9 by 13); a half-sheet pan or a large roasting dish is nearer the size. Two 9-inch pie plates will take roughly the same quantity if you have nothing that size.
- LardFour tablespoons melted lard for a quart of flour is a lean dough by pie standards. Butter or shortening works, but melted fat stirred into flour gives a soft, biscuit-like crust rather than a flaky one, which is what a cobbler crust is meant to be.
- YieldA full pan serves about twelve. Best warm, with cream.
Buckeye Cookery (first published in 1876 as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, and reissued in revised and retitled form in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and the attribution to Miss S. Alice Melching is typical of the book's method: hundreds of named women, each vouching for a working household recipe. The dish itself belongs to the American cobbler family, a group of fruit-and-dough puddings whose origins are often traced to places where pastry ovens and pastry cooks were said to be scarce and a biscuit dough could be mixed in minutes. The reliance on canned damsons is the period detail worth noticing. By the 1870s home canning in glass jars was practiced in the Midwest, and a cellar of put-up fruit meant a fruit pudding in February; damsons, too tart to eat out of hand, are said to have been commonly preserved. The closing line -- peaches, apples, or any kind of fresh or canned fruit -- is the real point of the recipe, a template for whatever the shelf held.