Q Which dishes are truly American and which aren't (evidently, all-American apple pie isn't American, for instance). Cobbler came up as being an American dessert. Do you know if this is true, and how do you make one?
A I can't tell you what fun it was that your question turned up. After checking present-day definitions, it spurred me to dig into my old American cookbooks. The quick and easy answer is that cobbler and its sibling slumps, buckles, crumbles, grunts and pandowdies were first made in Europe, as they are all relatives of pie and are made without a bottom crust and only with some kind of dough/batter/shortbread topping. Along with pies, they were one answer to how to stretch a little meat or other filling to heartily feed many mouths.
To save fuel, they were made in Dutch oven pots with hot coals piled on their flat top lids and more pushed underneath the trivets the Dutch ovens usually rested on. This way, you created a minioven with only a little fuel. [For more on Dutch ovens, see the camping story on T1.]
Technically, a cobbler is a filling baked in a shallow or deep pan topped with biscuit dough. With this discovery, I realized that the recipe I've always known and loved as cobbler is really a crumble because it is topped with big nubs of a butter/flour/sugar shortbread concoction.
So here is my technically incorrect cobbler for you to try. You can use rhubarb, peaches, nectarines, apricots, berries, apples or pears and merely change the quantity of sugar depending upon the sweetness of the fruit.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper hosts "The Splendid Table" on Minnesota Public Radio's, splendidtable.org. Send questions to table.mpr.org.
