Happy 4th! Edna Lewis’s Virginia Blackberry Cobbler - No. 347

A few peach cobbler notes + thoughts on being American right now

I OPENED UP A CAN OF PEACHES last week when I wrote about peach cobbler Texas-style. It was wonderful hearing from cooks from all sorts of places as to what they call cobbler.

It seems that cobbler is personal.

Today, I’d like to back up just a bit and tell you about the peach cobbler of my dreams and how I found it. And then I’ll step into the world of blackberry cobbler with an Edna Lewis recipe made for July 4th.

First, the best peach cobbler I’ve ever tasted is definitely the 1920s Kentucky recipe I wrote about in Baking in the American South. It comes from a Scott County schoolteacher named Mary Bradley Moss and was shared in the African American Heritage Center’s Heritage Cookbook in 1998. I found the cookbook when I was in Tuscaloosa researching the excellent collection of African American cookbooks at the University of Alabama.

To make it the best peach cobbler, you need ripe peaches with plenty of juice, a high oven heat, and a dark pan for lots of flavorful caramelization. What I learned about peaches is that they grew in a lot of places across America. Needing up to 800 chill hours (between 32 and 45ºF during their dormant period, depending on the variety) per year, plus loads of sunshine, they are quite specific in their requirements.

I hear Colorado today has some amazing peaches? We all know about California, the largest producer. And yes, we know how beloved the peach and its cobbler are in South Carolina, the number two U.S. producer, well ahead of the Peach State itself (Georgia) with its Peachtree Streets, peach queens, and the Peachtree Road Race this Friday morning.

I venture to say everyone in America loves peaches in the summer and has had access to them at some point in their lives for cobblers, ice cream, and such. I would also venture to say that peach cobbler is precious because it has nothing to give us but pleasure.

In fact, if we are to survive this turbulent summer with record heat in both the natural and political atmospheres, I say we had better set the ovens for cobbler right now. Our ancestors knew cobbler—peach, blackberry, blueberry, cherry—was a smart way to use up local fruit in a most irresistible fashion.

But I was hungry for blackberry cobbler, so I turned to a method that Virginia chef and author Edna Lewis knew and wrote about. She and Alabama chef Scott Peacock share the recipe in their 2003 book, The Gift of Southern Cooking.

I bought about 5 cups of fat, fresh, sweet blackberries from the local farm stand and quite possibly another 1 cup of tart, wild blackberries were growing at the back of my garden. I also had about 2 cups of fresh blueberries in the fridge, and I was thinking how lovely they would be mixed and mingled together underneath a blanket of buttery crust.