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Peach Cobbler
Peel ripe peaches, halve them, and fill a deep earthen baking-dish with them, leaving in a few of the pits to give flavour. Half fill the dish with ice water, sprinkle sugar over the peaches, then place over them a sheet of light but thick pastry. Pinch this down around the edge, slash the centre crosswise, and prick well. Bake till brown, then serve hot or cold with cream.
A deep-dish cobbler of the older American type: fruit, sugar, water and a single top crust, with no thickener and no measurements at all. The proportions are left to the cook, so the points below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Dish and quantityA "deep earthen baking-dish" is roughly a 2- to 3-quart casserole. Figure 3 to 3 1/2 lb of peaches, about 8 to 10 medium fruit, to fill one; it serves six to eight.
- The ice water is the hingeHalf-filling the dish with water sounds wrong to anyone used to a thickened filling, but it is deliberate: the liquid steams the fruit under the sealed crust and reduces to a thin syrup. Do not substitute a cornstarch slurry, and do not skip the slashes and prick-holes, which let that steam escape rather than lifting the pastry off the fruit.
- SugarNone is specified. For ripe peaches, 1/2 to 3/4 cup granulated sugar over the fruit is a fair reading; the dish is meant to taste of peach, not jam.
- OvenThe book says only "bake till brown." Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 375F for a further 35 to 45 minutes, until the crust is well coloured and juice bubbles at the slashes.
- "Light but thick pastry"Most likely a well-rested short crust rolled thicker than a pie lid, in the region of 1/4 inch, so it holds above the liquid without going sodden. A puff or heavily laminated dough is probably not what is meant here.
- The pitsA few whole stones left among the fruit are said to lend a faint almond note from the kernel inside, and this recipe calls for it deliberately. The shells stay intact during baking, but do not crack them open or add loose kernels: peach kernels contain amygdalin, the same compound that makes bitter almonds dangerous. Count the stones in and count them out before serving, or simply leave them out and add a drop of almond extract.
- PeelingBlanch the peaches 30 to 45 seconds in boiling water and shock them in ice water; the skins slip off. Freestone varieties halve cleanly, clingstones do not.
- Serving"With cream" here most likely means plain pouring cream rather than whipped. Cold, the syrup thickens slightly and the crust softens; the recipe leaves hot or cold entirely to the cook.
Cobbler is associated with American Dutch-oven and bake-kettle cookery, and is generally traced to settlers who wanted pie but lacked the equipment or the flour for a bottom crust; the name is usually explained as coming from the roughly "cobbled" look of the topping, though that etymology is traditional rather than documented. This version, with a single sheet of pastry over deep fruit swimming in water, is one of the older forms; pastry-topped and biscuit-topped versions both appear in nineteenth-century books, so it is safer to say this is not the biscuit-dropped topping most Americans now think of as cobbler than to claim it came first. Peaches were being shipped north in quantity by refrigerated rail from Georgia and the mid-Atlantic around the turn of the twentieth century, and household books of the period carry a good deal of instruction for using them quickly, before they turned.