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Peach Cobbler
A peach pie made in a baking pan to be cut out in squares. Make common pie paste, roll out the larger half of it to a thin sheet and take up off the table by rolling it up on the rolling pin and so unroll it on the pan. Put in rared and cut peaches an inch deep, dredge a little sugar over them, cover with the top crust and bake about half an hour.
A bakery-style slab pie rather than the soft-topped, spoon-dropped cobbler most Americans now expect. The instructions assume a professional pastry bench and a hot deck oven, so a few numbers need filling in.
- "Rared" peachesAlmost certainly a compositor's error for pared — peeled. Blanch ripe freestones for 30 seconds and slip the skins, or peel with a knife if they are firm.
- The panThe book says only "baking pan". A shallow-rimmed sheet pan of roughly 18 by 13 inches (a half-sheet) suits it; a quarter-sheet takes about half the quantities. The point of the shape is that the finished pie is cut into squares for service, not wedges.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book assumes a baker's oven. Half an hour for a thin double crust implies a hot oven, so a modern equivalent would be around 425F, dropped to 400F once the top has set and taken colour.
- "Common pie paste"A plain lard or shortening crust rather than puff. For a half-sheet, something like 1 lb 8 oz flour to 12 oz fat will do, split so the bottom sheet is the larger. Roll thin -- this is a two-crust slab, not a deep pie.
- JuicePeaches an inch deep and nothing but a dredge of sugar will flood a thin bottom crust. Modern practice is to toss the fruit with 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch or tapioca along with the sugar, or to blind-set the bottom sheet for 8 minutes before filling.
- How much sugar"A little" depends entirely on the fruit. Reckon 4 to 6 oz of sugar for every 3 lb of prepared peaches; ripe late-summer fruit needs the lower end.
- Venting and sealingCut steam slits in the top sheet and press the edges together at the pan rim, otherwise the syrup boils out at the sides. A wash of milk or egg gives the browning the recipe takes for granted.
- YieldA half-sheet cuts into 12 to 15 generous squares. It is best barely warm — cut hot, the filling runs.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, and this entry shows it: the dish is defined first by how it is portioned, "to be cut out in squares," because that is what a dining room needs. Note that the book itself calls this a peach pie; cobbler is our title, not its word. The name has often been linked to an older sense of a roughly cobbled-together dish, though that derivation is traditional rather than settled, and in American usage the term has covered a wide and shifting family -- biscuit-topped, batter-poured, and, as here, simply a fruit pie built flat in a pan. Peaches were the natural filling for it in season. The terseness is characteristic too. A book like this expects its reader to already know what "common pie paste" means and how hot the oven is running, and spends its words only on what distinguishes one dish from the next.