The Lovable “Lazy” Peach Cobbler - No. 346

A new summer rite of passage + my interview with Milk Street Radio

AT A RECENT LIBRARY TALK I shared the sweet secrets of peach cobbler. I spoke of the first cobblers baked over coals in cast-iron Dutch ovens, how butter is my go-to in fruit pies, and why you should bake cobbler in a dark pan so the juices caramelize around the edges.

Peach cobbler is pretty sacred in the South and a lot of other places, too. I thought I had covered the subject.

But a woman in the audience followed me back to the book signing table. She said my cobbler wasn’t the cobbler she was raised on in Texas. Hers had more of a batter topping and was easier to make than dealing with pie crust. It was the only cobbler she had ever known.

Piles of early Alabama peaches at Durbin Farms Market off the highway between Birmingham and Montgomery.

“Is it a cobbler, too?’’ she asked, looking me straight in the eyes.

I knew the versatile recipe of which she spoke. With flour, sugar, baking powder, and enough milk to moisten, it’s the batter you bake along with sweetened peaches or berries. And it’s so easy, once you make it the recipe is imprinted in memory.

‘’Yes,’’ I replied. ‘’It’s a cobbler. It’s your cobbler.’’ I made a note to myself to find the origins of this cobbler that wasn’t my cobbler because I was raised on peach cobbler with a latticed pastry top crust. But for now, for this cook beseeching me to affirm that the cobbler of her youth was not a fake, it was cobbler.

And I recalled this was the way my late friend Nathalie Dupree made peach cobbler. She called it Lazy Woman’s Cobbler or something like that, and although she was a graduate of the prestigious London Cordon Bleu cooking school and knew puff pastry, foie gras, and roasted breast of veal, a no-nonsense peach cobbler recipe she picked up somewhere in her life in the South better suited her.

What are your thoughts on peach cobbler? Batter, pie crust, or doesn’t matter as long as it’s warm and you’ve got vanilla ice cream?

I thought the best place to dive into this cobbler’s story might be in a Texas cookbook.

So I pulled Linda West Eckhardt’s The Only Texas Cookbook (1981), from my shelf and flipped to the index where I found, thankfully, peach cobbler. I knew peach cobbler was beloved in Texas and had just returned from a trip through the town of Stonewall, the peach capital of Texas. When I turned to Linda’s recipe, I was pleasantly surprised to find it was exactly what the woman in the audience had described.

Linda’s recipe was given to her by one of her mother’s friends, Lela Jowell, who grew up on a Texas Panhandle cattle ranch. ‘’God knows what kind of fruits they had up on that arid treeless prairie to begin with.’’

Linda says cobbler can mean ‘’a lot of different things. Essentially, it is a shortcut for a pie, combining a flour and baking powder batter with fruit’’— fresh or canned.

Busy people, with little access to fresh fruit, but with plenty of folks to feed, would have made this recipe, I surmised. And that sounded like how many of our favorite American recipes were born—assembled with a can of this or that and stirred together without fanfare.

Think about German Chocolate Cake and its rich filling of egg, coconut, pecans, and butter mixed with a can of sweetened condensed milk. Think about dump cake and its ease due to a box of cake mix, can of crushed pineapple, and stick of butter.

Texas desserts, says Linda, ‘’are dominated by flour and sugar’’ because old recipes were once made in remote places and their ingredients measured from 50-pound sacks. Wild berries that ripened or fruit that matured could be added.

Summer is always unpredictable at our house. If people come visit and stay with us, you can be assured we will have a suffocating heat wave and the AC system will go on the blink. That was the case this past weekend. The least I could do was whip up a quick peach cobbler and pile it with ice cream.

Plus, I was eager to make a recipe on which I wasn’t raised. I wanted to taste a cobbler that had been on someone’s mind all their life.

With this simple recipe, you will only need to find good ripe peaches. Then ask yourself how you’d like to season the cobbler to add a personal touch—a smidge of cinnamon? Definitely. A grating of lemon zest? Quite possibly.

This modern version of cobbler likely was an old German kuchen baked each summer when fruit came into season. And if you lived where it was too hot or too cold for fruit to come into season, you used canned. Linda West Eckhart called it ‘’Lela’s Special Cobbler.’’ I say it’s cobbler when served warm in bowls with cold vanilla ice cream melting into its crevices. It’s quite special and actually not lazy.

There’s nothing lazy about peeling peaches and making people happy with cobbler.

Happy summer baking!

- xo, Anne

PS. A second cobbler is coming next week for my Paid subscribers. I’m baking blackberry cobbler using blackberries from the local farm stand and some from my own blackberry bushes. So good!

You can listen to my interview about Baking in the American South with the legendary Chris Kimball of Milk Street Radio here. What a wonderful experience!

Come see me at Page to Plate in Sharon, CT, on August 2. "Southern Baking Secrets: A Talk with Anne Byrn" will be from 10-11 am, and I’m bringing pound cake! Here are the details.

And Happy Anniversary to my husband and eager cobbler taster, John! We married 32 years ago on a sunny morning in an English village and afterwards entertained friends and family for lunch in the garden out back. We served no peach cobbler, but Coronation Chicken was on the menu.

THE RECIPE:

Lela’s Special Peach Cobbler

With a recipe as basic as this, the little things matter. If you add 1/2 cup of milk the batter will be more cake like. If you add 3/4 cup milk then less so, and if you add 1 cup milk as many recipes call for, the batter is more rubbery. I find someplace between 1/2 and 3/4 cup is perfect. As for the flour, use what you have. But be advised that a bleached all-purpose flour or cake flour will make a more tender crust than a King Arthur unbleached, which is what I photographed above. As for seasoning the fruit, you be the judge. My peaches weren’t super-sweet, and as the season progresses they will be more so. If you plan on serving this topped with vanilla ice cream - and I advise this! - it’s best to under-sweeten than over-sweeten. And as much as I adore all peaches in this recipe, wouldn’t a cobbler with a few blackberries, blueberries, or cherries be fun, too?

Makes 8 servings

• 3 cups sliced peaches (from 6 to 8 peeled ripe peaches)

• 1/2 cup white sugar

• 1 stick salted or unsalted butter

• 1 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 cup light brown or white sugar

• 2 teaspoons baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1/2 teaspoon to 1 teaspoon kosher salt (if using unsalted butter, go with 1 teaspoon and with salted butter, use 1/2 teaspoon)

• 1/2 to 3/4 cup whole milk

• 2 teaspoons sugar for dusting the top, if desired

• Vanilla ice cream for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 400ºF.

2. Toss the peach slices with the 1/2 cup sugar, and set aside.

3. Place the butter in a 13- by 9-inch glass or ceramic pan and place in the oven for the butter to melt. Takes about 3 to 4 minutes.

4. Meanwhile, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in the milk until smooth.

5. Remove the pan with melted butter from the oven. Dollop the batter into the pan, leaving spaces between the dollops. Spoon the sweetened peaches and juices into those spaces. Bake until the juices bubble up and the cobbler browns lightly, about 30 to 35 minutes.

6. Remove from the oven, sprinkle sugar over the top. Serve warm in bowls with vanilla ice cream.