Food Fight

Grunts, Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers,
Brown Bettys, and Pandowdies

You may remember from childhood reading that Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, named her house Apple Slump after her favorite dessert. To make Apple Slump, she mixed sliced apples with sugar, cinnamon, and water in a casserole dish, capped them with biscuit dough, and steamed the whole affair so that the dough formed dumplings. Some food historians would also call that a grunt, although others insist a grunt is steamed and a slump is baked. Some folks maintain that pie pastry makes a better slump topping than biscuit dough. Others would call that variation a cobbler.

All of these wonderful fruit desserts date back to colonial days in America, if not before. Cook and author Richard Sax attempted to clarify the distinctions in his Classic Home Desserts, as follows:

Cobbler: Fruit baked with a crust, usually a top crust of biscuit dough; occasionally with both top and bottom crusts.

Crisp: Fruit topped with a "rubbed" mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and sometimes nuts.

Brown Betty: A crisp in which bread crumbs are layered in with the fruit instead of spread on top.

Crumble: A cousin of crisp, with a crunchy topping of oats, butter, flour, and brown sugar.

Pandowdy: Sliced fruit topped with a pastry crust that is cut up with a sharp knife ("dowdying") and pushed back into the fruit during the last few minutes of baking. Sometimes the crust is on the bottom and the dessert is inverted before serving.

Buckle: Usually berries scattered over a cake batter and topped with crumbs before baking and cutting into squares.

Grunt or slump: Fruit topped with drop biscuits or dumplings and steamed on top of the stove.

Do you have your own definitions? Perhaps a treasured family recipe? Write to us at anotherbite@digitalhearth.com, and tell us about it. Thank you!

Last Bite

Grazing in the Garden

This year, only one small bowl of green peas actually made it into the house. The problem was not raccoons, nor some kind of blight. The weather was fine: warm in early May for planting, then cold and rainy (perfect pea weather) for what seemed like weeks on end as the pea vines scrambled up the fence.

The problem was grazing. Every time one of us went out to the garden to weed, or to check on the tomato plants (good pea weather is not good tomato weather), we’d drift over to the pea fence, pick a few pods, and nibble. As the peapods started to fill out, our fingers would search out the plumpest ones, slit them open with a thumbnail, and pop the little green pearls into our mouths. The empty pods went right back into the garden. Even kids who don’t like cooked peas love fresh ones right off the vine. Those same kids love to pinch off a few sprigs of fresh parsley, too, or pull out a young carrot just to check on progress.

It will be the same with the cherry tomatoes later this month, and then with the ‘Better Boys’ in August. We may as well just set a table in the center of the garden and have meals out there. It’s hard to pretend you are just absent-mindedly snacking when you eat tomatoes, especially the big ones that drip down your chin, and most especially if you pick a few basil leaves to eat with them. That’s not grazing — that’s lunch!