We peeled peaches on the patio Wednesday night until the citronella candle burned down to a puddle. I blanched them on the stove in batches, Nora ran them out to the folding table in a colander, and the rest of us sat around a bowl of ice water with juice running to our elbows. Ryan peeled the fastest. Jack peeled one and ate it, which in his mind counted.
The truck had pulled into a parking lot in Columbia that morning, a refrigerated box truck with South Carolina tags and a line of people holding cash. A half bushel was $32, roughly twenty-four pounds of peaches. That's too many for a family of four to eat before they turn, so the plan was the same as every July: one cobbler that night, everything else into the freezer for January.
Peeling and freezing a half bushel
Drop ripe peaches into boiling water for about 30 seconds, firmer ones closer to a minute, then straight into ice water. The skins slide off under your thumb. We sliced them, tossed them with a little lemon juice and sugar to keep them from browning, and packed eight quart freezer bags with about 4 cups each. Pressed flat and laid on a sheet pan in the chest freezer in the garage, they freeze in thin slabs that stack like books. Each bag is one cobbler.
Cobbler, not crisp
People bring me peach crisp and call it cobbler, and I eat it, because I was raised right. But they're different desserts. A crisp has a crumbly topping of oats, butter and sugar scattered over the fruit. Granny June's cobbler was a batter cobbler: melted butter in the pan, a thin pancake-like batter poured over it, the peaches spooned on top and nothing stirred. Her card is four lines long and the last one is in capital letters: DO NOT STIR.
Here's why that works. The batter is lighter than the fruit and full of tiny bubbles from the baking powder, so as it heats it rises up through the peaches instead of staying underneath. It bakes into a golden crust around the fruit, crisp at the edges where it fried in the butter and soft, almost custardy, where it meets the peaches. Stir it all together and the batter can't climb, so you get a dense, gummy layer instead.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
- 4 cups peeled, sliced ripe peaches (6 to 7 medium)
- 1/4 cup sugar for the peaches
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (optional; Granny didn't)
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
How I make it
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Put the butter in a 9x13 metal baking pan and set it in the oven while it heats, about 5 minutes, until the butter is melted. Don't let it go past light brown.
- Toss the peaches with 1/4 cup sugar, the lemon juice and the cinnamon if you're using it. Let them sit while you make the batter.
- Whisk the flour, 1 cup sugar, baking powder and salt, then whisk in the milk and vanilla until smooth. It will be thin.
- Pour the batter over the melted butter. Don't stir. Spoon the peaches and their juice evenly over the top. Don't stir that either.
- Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until the crust has risen up around the fruit and is deep golden, the edges are bubbling and a toothpick in a patch of batter comes out clean.
- Let it rest 15 minutes. Serve warm, with vanilla ice cream if there's any in the freezer.
What went wrong once: years ago, the first time I made this on my own, I used grocery-store peaches in March, hard as baseballs. The batter baked up beautifully around fruit that tasted like raw potato. A batter cobbler needs ripe, juicy fruit, because that juice is what keeps the inside soft. That's why the freezer bags matter. A January cobbler made from July peaches beats a January cobbler made from January peaches every time.
To bake from the freezer, thaw a bag overnight in the fridge and pour off about half the juice before the peaches go on the batter, or the middle stays wet. Everything else is the same.
The half bushel worked out to about $3.50 for each quart of peaches, so the cobbler, with butter, milk and sugar, came to around $5.50 for a pan that feeds eight. Jack claimed the corner where the batter baked up crunchy with butter and called it a ten. The other three corners were mine, and I'm not sorry.
