Plum Cobbler
Take one quart of flour, four table-spoons melted lard, half teaspoon salt, two tea-spoons baking-powder; mix as for biscuit , with either sweet milk or water, roll thin, and line a pudding -dish or dripping-pan, nine by eighteen inches; mix three table-spoons flour and two of sugar together, and sprinkle over the crust; then pour in three pints canned damson plums, and sprinkle over them one coffee-cup sugar; wet the edges with a little flour and water mixed, put on upper crust, press the edges together, make two openings by cutting two incisions at right angles an inch in length, and bake in a quick oven half an hour. Peaches, apples, or any kind of fresh or canned fruit, can be made in the same wav. - Miss S. Alice Melching.
A biscuit-dough double crust over canned plums, baked in a dripping pan. The measurements are volume-by-vessel throughout, and the pan is larger than most modern bakeware.
- A quart of flourFour cups, roughly 18 oz of all-purpose. With 4 tablespoons of melted lard this is a lean, sturdy biscuit dough, not a rich pastry; it is meant to hold juice rather than flake.
- Coffee-cupIn American books of this period a coffee-cup runs 6 to 8 fl oz. Take it as one cup of sugar, and reduce it if the canned plums are already packed in heavy syrup.
- Quick ovenBroadly 400-450F. The high heat sets the bottom crust before the fruit juices soak through it.
- The floured bottom crustThe three tablespoons flour and two of sugar scattered over the lower crust do real work: they absorb the plum liquid as it boils and help keep the base from turning to paste. Worth keeping rather than stirring a thickener into the fruit instead.
- Damsons and their stonesDamsons are small, very tart blue plums, and being clingstone they were often put up whole and unpitted. Modern canned or jarred plums vary; drain off most of the syrup, and check for stones before the top crust goes on.
- Three pints of fruitAbout six cups, drained. If you are using fresh plums instead, they will throw more liquid than canned fruit and need either a longer bake or an extra spoonful of flour on the base.
- The panA 9 by 18 inch dripping pan is about 162 square inches, appreciably smaller than a half-sheet pan (13 by 18, about 234). A standard 9 by 13 dish holds roughly three-quarters as much; scale the fruit and dough down accordingly, or the filling will run over.
- TimeHalf an hour is right for a shallow pan at high heat. Go by the crust: deep golden on top, and juice visibly bubbling up through the two cut vents.
- YieldThe full-size pan serves twelve to sixteen. Best warm, within a few hours of baking, while the bottom crust still has some structure.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of American community and regional compilations of the 1880s, in which recipes arrived signed by the women who sent them in, as this one is. The origin of the word "cobbler" is obscure, and it is first recorded in nineteenth-century American use; in the American South it settled into exactly this form: biscuit dough rather than short pastry, baked in whatever wide pan the kitchen had, usually a dripping pan from under the roast. The choice of damsons is telling. They are too sour and too stony to eat out of hand, and they were put up in jars in quantity and drawn on all winter; the recipe assumes canned fruit as the default and offers fresh only as an afterthought. The closing line about peaches or apples "or any kind of fresh or canned fruit" is the real subject here: a household formula for the crust, into which whatever the pantry held could be poured.