There are few purer joys than biting into a peak-season, ultraripe piece of summer fruit. But one of those joys is biting into a peak-season, ultraripe, piece of summer fruit baked with a combination of flour, butter, and sugar. (Also vanilla ice cream. Always vanilla ice cream.)
So is it a cobbler, or a crisp? And what exactly is a crumble?
The differences, it turns out, are as confusing and debatable as the myriad definitions of sandwich. It’s so regional that, as the New York Times’ Kim Severson wrote in her 2013 deep-dive on cobblers, “people within the same county will disagree on the proper form.”
And while getting in the middle of this debate sounds messier than sifting flour, we dove into our favorite baking cookbooks for a definitive answer on how they differ and what that means for your future bakes.
Perfectly fluffy biscuits sit on top of this cherry cobbler.
Cobbler
Cobbler has been around in America the longest of the three desserts; the Oxford Companion to Food dates its inception back to the 1850s. By the mid-19th century, it had become the dish we know now: fruit baked in the oven with some form of dough. In 1859, cobbler was defined in John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms as: “A sort of pie, baked in a pot lined with dough of great thickness, upon which the fruit is placed; according to the fruit, it is an apple or a peach cobbler.” Well, John, that sounds like…pie.
But it turns out, that’s what cobbler was during this period of American cooking. In 1881, Abby Fisher, an escaped slave who fled the South after the Civil War to San Francisco, published some of her recipes in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. In the cookbook, her peach cobbler uses pastry dough both underneath and on top. In many parts of the South, pastry dough is still used in cobblers, sometimes in that pie-like form, sometimes with the dough just on top.
But as time went on, we began to associate cobbler with either having a biscuit topping, like a shortcake in large format, or more of a cake batter, which, as Severson also points out, is a style found at barbecue joints across the South.
