What’s a Cobbler? What’s a Crisp?

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Published 1994

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Much as we might like to be definitive, old-fashioned desserts are “folk food”—people’s food—cooked at home, made with slight variations from kitchen to kitchen, and like all folk culture, the recipes are passed orally from person to person, often never written down.

For this reason, definitions are hard to agree upon. I think of a real cobbler as made with biscuit dough, but pie-crust dough is often used. For me, it’s dough on top, fruit underneath. But plenty of Southern peach cobblers have bottom crusts or two crusts with fruit in between. Who is to say, in some attempt at academic codification, that these traditional Southern cobblers are not true cobblers?