It's like calling 'Kind of Blue' a Dixieland album because Miles Davis was a jazz musician. There's an astonishing array of different ways to cook fresh fruit, and calling every fruit dessert a 'cobbler' obscures the individuality of each of them. It would be a disgrace if buckles, slumps, pandowdies, and other charmingly named, obscure fruit desserts were lost to history because contemporary Americans can't be bothered to make a distinction between fruit baked with pie crust and fruit steamed with dumplings. I do not want to live in a world where common ignorance relegates crisps - a magnificent and important category of dessert in their own right - to another, completely separate category of dessert. I have recently been alarmed to learn of the indiscriminateness with which the general public uses the term 'cobbler.' I partially blame Paula Deen, whose ostensible cobbler recipe is the top result when you Google 'peach cobbler.' Deen's recipe is a buckle in disguise: She calls for spooning cooked peaches on top of a thin cake batter and then baking until the batter rises above the fruit.īut Deen is not the only offender: Southern Living, doing its best BuzzFeed impression, offers us '14 Crazy-Good Fruit Cobblers,' among which are three pandowdy recipes (fruit topped with pie crust), two crisp recipes (fruit topped with streusel), a variation on Deen's buckle, a fruit bar recipe, and a bloody shortcake recipe.īut, you may ask, wouldn't a clafoutis by any other name taste as sweet? (That's fruit baked with a crepe-like batter, for the record.) Why does it matter? (MUST CREDIT: Slate photo by Ellie Skrzat.) SLATE Illustrates HOWTO-COBBLER (category d), by L.V. A cobbler is a dessert consisting of sugared fruit topped with a sweetened biscuit topping. Comments Peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

Paula deen peach tart