Ultimate Guide to Summer Fruit Desserts
By Rebekah Denn
Summer fruits are at their height, and it’s prime time for enjoying them in a cobbler or a crisp. Or perhaps a crumble? A slump or a grunt? A buckle? A betty? A galette? Let’s not even get into sonkers and pandowdies — or maybe we should do that too.
Some of these baked goods are more familiar than others, but all are superb vehicles for fruit.
As lauded pie-baking teacher Kate McDermott puts it, cobblers and crisps and buckles and their kin are all pies by another name.
“They are first cousins of fruit pies as they share the same basic ingredients — fruit, flour, butter, and sugar,” the Port Angeles author wrote in her cookbook “Pie Camp.”
In most cases these baked fruit desserts are summer-simple and rustic, made with sprinkled toppings or spooned-on batter rather than crimped crusts. Choose whichever one fits your mood and your latest market haul. They’re all delicious — by any name.
Cobbler vs Crisp vs Crumble
Cobblers are fruit baked with a topping of rich biscuit dough. The dough is sometimes spread in a thin layer over the fruit, sometimes spoon-dropped with open gaps of cooked fruit showing through the crust.
- PCC’s versatile cobbler recipe calls for dropping spoonfuls of dough over the fruit.
- Seattle star chef Renee Erickson has a genius recipe for peach cobbler.
Crisps involve baking fruit with a crumbly topping that usually includes flour, sugar and spices, and often nuts or oats.
One PCC version (online here) uses oats in the topping and dresses it up with cinnamon crème fraiche.
A fruit crumble is a crisp with a simple streusel topping — no oats or nuts.
Slumps vs Grunts
Grunts are like cobblers — fruit covered with a biscuit or dumpling topping — but they are commonly steamed on the stovetop rather than baked in the oven. As King Arthur Flour’s experts tell us, they’re a New England specialty. Some definitions say a grunt must have the dumpling topping, rather than allowing biscuit dough, but we’re flexible.
- Both PCC’s Peach-Raspberry Grunt and Ginger Pear Berry Grunt are cooked in a covered skillet.
Slumps are easy! When it comes to baked goods, a slump is just another name for a grunt. (Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes says the terms date to Colonial days, and which one you use depends on the region of New England where the recipe originated.) But wait — is it that easy? The Joy of Cooking, a definitive kitchen Bible, says that slumps are cooked in covered saucepans, while grunts are steamed in a mold inside a pot of water and then inverted when served.
Regardless of those historic details, most modern cooks consider grunts and slumps interchangeable. Seattleites might be more familiar with the term slump thanks to the (non-inverted) wild huckleberry slump served for years at Chinook’s at Salmon Bay.
Betty vs. buckle
Fruit Betties are distinctive because they are made with buttered breadcrumbs or cake crumbs rather than streusels or biscuits or pie dough. A “Brown Betty” is made with brown sugar. A thrifty Colonial-era dish, Betties are traditionally made with apples, but can be made with other fruits as well. PCC’s recipe is for Apple and Apricot Brown Betty.
A fruit buckle is “halfway between a cake and a fruit crisp,” say Cory Schreiber and Julie Richardson in their book “Rustic Fruit Desserts.” Specifically, it’s a single-layer cake with fruit (often blueberries) in the batter, often with a streusel topping. The name comes from the way the surface of the cake buckles around the fruit.
- Here’s a recipe for PCC’s blueberry buckle, which can also be made with frozen fruit.
Galettes vs sonkers vs pandowdies
A fruit galette is a rustic single-crust pie where the crust is rolled out, the filling is placed in the center, and then the crust is irregularly folded around the filling, leaving a generous open space in the middle. It’s not as polished-looking as a pie, but there’s no trimming, crimping, parbaking or fear of imperfection. Try PCC’s fruit galette recipe here.
Sonkers are an extra-juicy specialty of a very specific place. They’re famous in Surry County, North Carolina, and involve pouring a thin batter over already-cooked fruit and then baking it in the oven. America’s Test Kitchen suggests going “bonkers for sonkers” with this strawberry sonker recipe, which allows frozen berries too.
Another early American specialty, pandowdies are the most pie-like of all these baked goods. They’re something like a deep-dish pie covered by a thick pastry crust that’s broken up before serving. Some sources say the name comes from its homely, or “dowdy” appearance, other say “dowdie” is an old-fashioned term for scoring or breaking the baked pie crust. Try PCC’s pandowdy recipe using a premade crust.
Got questions? Want to debate these differences, or share recipes for a future issue of Sound Consumer? Write us at editor@pccmarkets.com.