Spectacularly simple and simply spectacular

By Melissa Clark, The New York Times

Generally filled with bubbling fruit nestled into a buttery, sugary foundation, cobblers are beloved in the canon of homey desserts. The problem is, there’s no consensus about what, exactly, they are.

For some cooking authorities, like Virginia-born chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis, cobblers are baked summer peaches layered with raw pie dough to help thicken the juices, then topped with a flaky crust.

Others prefer syrupy berries covered in fluffy biscuits shaped like golden cobblestones, a likeness that may have inspired the name (or not; there’s no definitive etymology).

Then there are those who believe that cobblers consist of batter strewed with fruit, which bake up solid and caky with jammy pockets throughout.

Finding my own place on this spectrum was the first step for the final episode of my YouTube series, “Shortcut vs. Showstopper.”

All three of the aforementioned cobbler styles are fairly simple, but the batter version is the easiest. It’s made with melted butter, so there’s no need to worry about keeping the fat cold and using a gentle touch when working it into the flour — steps essential for light, flaky pie and biscuit doughs. So it was exactly the style I gravitated toward.

Standard batter cobbler recipes are so straightforward that they hardly need streamlining. But I did make one big edit: cooking everything in one skillet to reduce cleanup.

Then I made two tweaks to add depth but not work. The first was to simmer the peaches in a brown sugar and lemon juice instead of regular sugar to lend caramel notes and tang. I took it one step further by letting the butter brown after melting it, which gives the cobbler a nutty, toasty character.

Creating anything more elaborate for a showstopping recipe was a bigger challenge. After all, the point of cobbler is a fuss-free, casual and delectable dessert. I’d need a compelling reason to complicate it.

The answer was right in front of me, or rather behind me, in an upside-down peach cobbler, which I wrote about last summer. The idea here is that French apple tarte Tatin meets biscuit-topped peach cobbler, and both go head over heels.