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Peach Cobbler Southern Style
D'Artois de Peches.
A large pie baked in a shallow baking pan, from 1 to 2 1/2 inches in depth, with bottom and top crust, glazed and sugared on top and cut out in square or triangular pieces.
Fine puff paste is too rich for this purpose. Ordinary flaky pie paste made with 10 or 12 ounces of butter to a pound of flour is best. Cover the bottom of the pan with a sheet of paste rolled quite than. Fill in with ripe peeled peaches, strew over them half their weight of sugar and a very little nutmeg. Cover with another thin sheet of paste and bake about 3/4 hour. When half done brush over the top with egg and water and strew granulated sugar over. Put back and bake it to a rich color. When the fruit is too dry to make its own syrup make a sauce to go with the cobbler. All sorts of fruit and rhubarb can be used this way. Canned fruit should be stewed down till the juice becomes thick before being put into the paste lined pan.
A slab pie in all but name, and the instructions assume a cook who already knows how to handle pie paste. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the sugar load, and what happens to a bottom crust under wet fruit.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the bottom crust, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for the remainder of the three-quarters of an hour. The egg-and-sugar glaze goes on at the halfway mark, as written, or it will scorch.
- The paste ratioTen to twelve ounces of butter to a pound of flour is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 sticks to 3 1/2 cups flour, toward the rich end of ordinary pie dough but well short of puff paste. The recipe's own objection is that fine puff paste is simply too rich for this purpose; keep the butter in visible flakes and the water ice cold.
- "Rolled quite than"A printer's error for "quite thin." Both sheets should be thin, about 1/8 inch, so the top crisps and the bottom does not stay pale and doughy under the fruit.
- Sugar by weightHalf the weight of the peaches in sugar is very sweet by current taste about 1 1/2 lb sugar to 3 lb fruit. A third of the fruit's weight is closer to modern practice, and less sugar also draws out less juice.
- Nothing thickens the juiceThis is the hinge. Ripe peaches release a great deal of liquid and there is no flour, starch or tapioca here to hold it, which is why the recipe tells you to stew canned fruit down first. Tossing the fresh fruit with 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or flour, or letting the peeled slices macerate in the sugar and draining off some of the syrup, keeps the bottom sheet from going to paste.
- The panOne to two and a half inches deep and shallow means shallow: a half-sheet pan or a 9x13 baking dish. Line it right up the sides so the fruit juice cannot run underneath the bottom crust.
- Yield and servingA half-sheet cut in squares or triangles gives roughly 12 to 15 portions. If the peaches were dry and made no syrup of their own, the recipe calls for a sauce to go with the cobbler but does not say what it should be; a warm fruit syrup is the obvious reading.
The heading pulls in two directions, which is the interesting thing about it: d'Artois is a French pastry name, generally traced to the Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, and in professional kitchens it usually means a filling sealed between two sheets of puff paste and cut into bars. "Peach Cobbler Southern Style" sits beside it as the American hotel-menu name. Jessup Whitehead wrote for cooks in commercial kitchens and steamboat and hotel bakeshops, where a dish had to be produced in quantity and portioned by the knife. Hence the shallow pan, the square or triangular cuts, and the practical warning that fine puff paste is wasted here and hence the closing note that any fruit or rhubarb will do, since a working pastry cook used what the delivery brought.