This “magic” apple-plum cobbler bakes in one pan and somehow turns simple summer fruit into deep, syrupy pockets and crisp edges—perfect with melting vanilla ice cream.
September is my favorite in food, weather and outlook. The number of days above 90 degrees finally peters off. I live for cardigan weather. I love that it goes in with a beach weekend and goes out with cinnamon sticks and warm cider. The markets are still teeming with peaches and plum, zucchini and eggplant, but you can also go apple picking and find some fancy new squash to cook. But my cooking always feels like it’s on one team or another — we’re either making caprese or we’re baking ziti, little for the in-between days. Where are the intersections of summer and winter squash? Where’s the peach and grape pie? Let’s fix this.
If you can read about something called a magic peach cobbler that you make more or less entirely in the pan you bake it and not have it in the oven, say, 15 minutes later, you are made of stronger stuff than me. It comes by way of the grandmother of Ian Knauer and if you go way back on this site, you’ll find he’s also the person behind those exquisite Brown Butter Brown Sugar Shorties from his days at Gourmet. These days, he’s got a place called The Farm Cooking School in Stockton, New Jersey and spoke recently about his grandmother who, with seven kids, had no time to fuss with anything but straightforward recipes like this.
I have scoured hundreds of recipes and concluded that nobody agrees on what a cobbler is aside from being cousins of grunts, pandowdys, slumps, dough-boys and, no, I will never get tired of referencing baked goods with funny names. Most recipes agree that there’s fruit at the bottom and topped with either a cake batter or dollops of biscuit or dumpling dough, and sure enough, we have examples of each in the archives one with cornmeal drop biscuits and another with a crispy cake lid. But this renegade grandmother — sounds like a good life goal, tbh — doesn’t even follow those rules. There’s butter, an eggless pancake-like batter over it and then the fruit goes on top and in the oven gets enveloped like a buckle–style cake, creating deep pockets of collapsed fruit and crisp edges. You scoop it, still warm, from the dish so that the vanilla ice cream on top quickly succumbs unless you finish it first. I believe you have it in you.
Field | |
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Recipe name | magic apple plum cobbler |
Publication date | September 16, 2016 |
Servings | Not specified in the original text |
Total time | Not specified in the original text |
Difficulty | Not specified in the original text |
Source / author | Ian Knauer’s grandmother (recipe provenance mentioned); original author not specified in text |
Key ingredients noted in text | Apples, plums, melted butter, batter (eggless, pancake-like), cinnamon sugar, vanilla ice cream (for serving) |
Tip |
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Pour the quick-whisked batter over melted butter in the pan before arranging the fruit — that pan-to-oven trick is central to the texture. |
Arrange apples and plums on top of the batter so they become enveloped while baking, forming syrupy pockets and crisp edges. |
Finish with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar for an autumnal lift. |
Scoop warm and serve with vanilla ice cream so the ice cream melts into the hot cobbler. |
