Within two weeks, I have made peach cobbler, raspberry crisp, blueberry pie, and a few other fruit concoctions—I like to take advantage of the abundance of summer fruits. As I made a streusel topping for a triple-berry coffeecake, it reminded me of a German dessert, kuchen, which influenced buckle. This triggered my thoughts to all these other unusual terms of old-fashioned American fruit desserts besides the more familiar cobblers and crisps. Here's a fruit-dessert primer:
A cobbler includes baked, sweetened fruit pieces with some spices and a little bit of thickener with a crust. Most cobblers are made with a top crust of biscuit dough, which may be in a single layer or individual biscuits, or “cobbles” but some are made with a bottom crust as well as a top crust.
A crisp is similar to cobbler, except it's made with crumb toppings and nuts are often added.
A crumble is an English cousin to our crisp. It has a crunchy, shortbread-like topping of oats, butter, flour, and brown sugar—usually made with rhubarb or gooseberries.
A crunch is also very much like the crisp, except the fruit is sandwiched between two layers of sweetened, butter crumbs. It is served in squares like bar cookies.
A brown betty is both layered and topped with sweet butter crumbs. The crumbs should be dry to absorb between the layers while remaining crunchy on top. Breadcrumbs or graham-cracker crumbs are used in this dessert.
A buckle is generally made with berries folded in cake batter before baking with some crumb topping.
A pandowdy has baked and sliced fruit, traditionally with apples and a pastry crust or biscuit dough. The crust is cut and pressed into the filling while baking.
Grunts and slumps descended from puddings cooked in pots with steamed fruits topped with dumplings. Grunts are steamed in a mold and inverted when served, whereas slumps are cooked in a covered pan and served dumplings side up in a bowl.
