The Extended Family of Cobblers and Crisps

Appears in

Published 1994

About

Fruit and dough—these are the essentials. Combine them in different ways (fruit on the bottom, fruit on top, fruit in between), vary the dough (biscuit dough, bread dough, pie crust, crumbs or crumbled streusel), and you’ve got the whole extended family that includes cobblers, crisps, brown Bettys, crumbles, pandowdies, even shortcakes.

The simplest of these sorts of desserts may be one put together by Appalachian housewives. Many people who grew up in the hills of Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Georgia remember that when there wasn’t pie, their mothers made what Ruth Holcomb, a rural cook quoted in The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery (1984), calls “Applesauce Pie”: