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Peach Cobbler
2 quarts drained canned peaches 1 1/2 cups sugar 3 tablespoons butter Biscuit dough Place the peaches, sugar and butter in a deep pan. Prepare a rich biscuit dough, using two tablespoons of butter to each cup of flour, and proceed as for cream biscuits. Roll out to one-third inch thickness, and place over the top of the peaches. Bake in a quick oven. Any fruit may be used.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century American cookbooks: it assumes you already know how to make biscuit dough and how long a cobbler bakes. Two things need filling in — the dough quantity and the oven.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F on a modern dial, though period usage varies. At that heat a cobbler this size will take somewhere around 30 to 40 minutes: bake until the biscuit top is browned through and the fruit is bubbling at the edges.
- The dough, in figuresThe proportion given — 2 tablespoons butter per cup of flour — is all the book offers. For 2 quarts of fruit, make it with 2 cups flour, 4 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and enough milk or cream to bind, roughly 3/4 cup.
- "Cream biscuits"A rich biscuit dough mixed with cream or rich milk rather than water, cut in or rubbed like pastry and handled as little as possible. It is a shortcake dough, not a pie crust; rolled to one-third inch it will rise appreciably in the oven.
- Pan sizeTwo quarts of drained fruit wants a 9x13 dish or a 3-quart baking dish, and it should not be filled past two-thirds or the syrup will boil over. Set it on a sheet pan.
- The sugarA cup and a half is a great deal of sugar for fruit already canned in syrup; half a cup to three-quarters is usually enough, and a squeeze of lemon does more for the flavor than more sugar.
- Vent the topThe recipe says only to lay the dough over the peaches. Cut two or three slits, or leave a half-inch gap at the edge, so steam escapes rather than steaming the underside of the biscuit into paste.
- ThickeningDrained canned fruit still throws liquid. If you want a cobbler that holds its shape on the spoon rather than a soupy one, toss the peaches with a tablespoon of cornstarch before they go in the pan.
- YieldServes eight to ten. Best eaten warm, within an hour or two of baking, while the biscuit is still crisp on top.
Cobbler is an American answer to the English fruit pie made by cooks who had fruit and a hot oven but no patience for pastry: a deep dish of sweetened fruit under a biscuit or batter lid, the name generally traced to the rough cobbled look of the dropped or rolled dough. The reliance on canned peaches is itself a period marker: commercial canning had made out-of-season fruit an ordinary pantry staple by the early twentieth century, and the closing line -- "Any fruit may be used" -- tells you the author expected the reader to open whatever was on the shelf.