In the coming days and weeks, I’m going to be blowing the lid off the international debate about cobbler. ‘Round these parts, cobbler is everywhere. Particularly in the summertime, various fruit cobblers can be found at diners, church potlucks, family picnics, and parole coming home parties. And one thing I’ve found is that everyone—everyone—has his own idea of what cobbler is.
The "real" cobbler recipe, from what my research indicates, involves spooning a biscuity topping on top of fruit and baking the dish in the oven. When baked, the topping creates a "cobbled" effect—hence the name. My mother-in-law’s cobbler, on the other hand, is topped with a flat pie crust, and some folks even tear up pieces of crust and mix them in with the fruit. I happen to prefer the recipe I’m posting today, my stepmother Patsy’s recipe, which is probably farther away from actual cobbler than any other…but that doesn’t make it any less yummy.
That’s my purpose for this series of posts—not to determine, when it’s all said and done, which interpretation of cobbler is the best, but to lay out for you all the options you have, and to encourage you to make all of them, and to give myself an valid excuse to try them and eat them ’til I bloat in the interest of culinary curiosity. I need all the rationalization I can get.
The Cast of Characters: Milk, Butter, sugar, self-rising flour, and blackberries.
First, place 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter in a microwaveable dish.
Melt the butter.
Now measure 1 cup of sugar and pour into a mixing bowl.
Take self-rising flour…
Measure 1 cup…
And dump into the bowl. Whisk in 1 cup of milk.
Mix together well.
Now get your melted butter…
And pour it into the bowl.
Whisk together. I love action whisk shots.
Now butter a baking dish…
Aww, c’mon. Don’t hold back. Butter that baby!
Now take two generous cups of blackberries. These are fresh, but frozen works just fine.
Give ’em a good rinse and lightly pat them dry.
Now pour the batter into the buttered baking dish. (Batter…buttered…batter…buttered…Betty Botta bought some butter, but she said, "This butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter will make my bitter batter better. So she bought a bit of butter; better than the bitter butter to make her bitter batter better. So ’twas better Betty Botta bought a bit of better butter. Amen.)
Say that fast eighteen times.
Now start sprinkling the 2 cups of blackberries over the top of the batter.
Try to distribute them evenly…
Until they’re all in there.
Now, sprinkle 1/4 cup sugar evenly over the top.
Because if some sugar is good, even more sugar is better. That single statement sums up the entire philosophy of my cooking.
Now pop the dish into the oven and bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour, or until golden and bubbly. My dad’s wife, Patsy, likes to sprinkle an additional teaspoon of sugar over the cobbler 10 minutes before it’s done.
And here’s what it’ll look like when you take it out.
Hey, look! It kind of looks like a cobblestone street, doesn’t it? Who’s got the cobbler NOW?
Up close, it kind of looks like a blueberry muffin, doesn’t it?
To serve, just stick a big honkin’ spoon in and scoop some out.
And once you put it on the plate, if it doesn’t look like enough, which, in my case, it didn’t…
Go ahead and get some more. Remember: if some is good, more is better.
Now. You can whip some fresh sweetened cream. Or you can retrieve that vanilla Haagen Dazs from the freezer. Or you can…
Use this.
Hey, whoever originally maligned this great American invention was crazy.
And don’t be shy…
Remember…if some is good…
More is better.
Or, you could just stick to the "some" approach like most reasonable humans.
