Peach Cobbler
Rule for Shortcake No. 2 1 qt. peaches 2 cups sugar Pare and stone the peaches; fill a granite baking dish one-half full, add the sugar; roll the shortcake paste to exactly fit the pan, cut two or three gashes to allow steam to escape; cover the fruit and bake for an hour or longer, or until the peaches show a dark red color. Cool and serve with sugar and cream.
A cobbler in the older American sense: fruit under a single sheet of biscuit dough, baked long and slow until the juices thicken. The recipe assumes you have already turned back a page for the shortcake paste, and it assumes you know your own oven.
- The missing dough"Shortcake paste" refers to a recipe given elsewhere in the book, and in this period would normally be a biscuit-type dough (flour, leavening, salt, fat rubbed in, milk to bind) rather than a sweetened cake batter or pie pastry. Roll it thick enough — about half an inch — that it does not go soggy under an hour of bubbling fruit.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal when ovens had no dials. Moderate heat, around 350–375F, suits the long bake; hotter and the crust browns well before the peaches break down.
- A quart of peachesProbably measured by volume; that is roughly 2 lb of fruit, or about six medium peaches. Sliced rather than halved gives more even cooking.
- Two cups of sugarVery sweet by current taste. With ripe summer peaches, half to two-thirds of that is closer to modern palates; the sugar also draws out juice, so cutting it back means slightly less liquid in the dish.
- Granite baking dishGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel, a common turn-of-the-century pan. Any 2-quart ceramic, glass or enamelled baking dish works; avoid bare cast iron or aluminium, which react with acidic fruit.
- "Dark red color"Sugar and peach juice cooking down will deepen to an amber-red, and the fruit itself darkens as it cooks. An hour is a minimum; go until the filling is visibly thick and bubbling through the gashes rather than watery.
- CoolingThe recipe says to cool before serving. Hot from the oven the filling is thin and will run; a rest of twenty to thirty minutes should let it set enough to serve in spoonfuls.
- YieldProbably about six servings, with sugar and cream added at serving as directed.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills — booklets given away or sold cheaply to keep a particular brand of flour in the kitchen and in mind. That commercial purpose helps explain the recipe: what the company was really selling was the shortcake paste, and the peaches are a variation on it, a cousin of strawberry shortcake and its kin rather than of the pies. The word cobbler is American and appears in print from around the middle of the nineteenth century; it is often traced to the "cobbled" look of dough dropped in rough patches over fruit, though this version, with a single rolled sheet vented by a few gashes, shows how loosely the term was applied. It was served cooled, with plain sugar and cream.