Catfish Out of Water

I've been thinking about making something with apples for Christmas. I have a fruit bowl on my kitchen counter that I usually keep a handful of apples or pears in. And I made the rather foreseeable mistake of buying apples in bulk this week! So, now I have almost 2 dozen apples that I have to figure out something to do with. Maybe an apple pie? Perhaps an apple crisp? Or even an apple cobbler? Honestly, I don't quite know the difference between apple cobblers and the like.

But oh did that get me down a rabbit hole!

Not an Apple Pie

What do you do with apples when you don't want to make a pie? Apparently quite a lot! And a lot of the recipes surrounding apples seemed to have come about out of this exact same dilemma.

When I was searching for apple recipes I came across the same adage over and over again:

Why do you make an apple crisp? Because it’s easier than a pie!

Obviously I’m paraphrasing and they had other reasons to make crisps. But this was exactly my thought process! I have too many apples because... Costco. So, what can I make that isn’t a pie??

As much as I wouldn’t necessarily mind making a pie and it isn’t nearly as difficult as it’s sometimes made out to be. It is rather time consuming! And, when you’re planning on spending all day cooking, like for Christmas, I would rather focus on the main dish the day of. Long, in-depth desserts are for when that is the goal for the day.

This year I also made not one, but two cheesecake for Thanksgiving (Irish Cream and Pumpkin)! And I don't quite have that stamina for Christmas. I haven’t had a full day off of work in 4 weeks, my feet hurt so bad that I can barely stand up, and the pads of my feet are still numb and tingly!

So, simplify. Apple crisp or apple cobbler or apple something that isn't pie! Fittingly, a lot of types of apple desserts came about or came into popularity during WWII when people were looking for a simpler alternative to more traditional apple pies.

What's the Difference Between Apple Cobblers, Apple Crisps, Apple Crumbles, Apple... XYZ??

I first thought about making an apple crisp. I've made this before and it was absolutely delicious. But the more that I searched for apple crisp recipes, the more I realized that there are A LOT of types of apple dessert recipes with subtle differences.

Apple crisp, apple cobbler, apple crumble, apple pandowdy, apple brown Betty, apple Charlotte, apple grunt, apple slump... Is there anything that you can't make with apples, sugar, flour, and butter??

Apparently not. And the difference between apple cobblers and apple... everything else appears to be slight, at best!

The Deluth News Tribune and Canadian Living do an okay job at differentiating between the various fruit desserts. But a good, extensive article on the subject is difficult to find. From what I can gather, there are some staple key differences, though, and this has helped me immensely in thinking about what to make in the future.

Apple Crisp

The first thing that I realized is that there's no such thing as an “old fashioned” apple crisp. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people try to make recipes sound more interesting than they are.

Old Fashioned Apple Crisps. Easy Apple Crisps. Traditional Apple Crisps. The Best Apple Crisps. Not only are these subjective or dubious at best, some of the are outright fallacies!

Apple crisps were first mentioned in a cookbook in 1924 (Everybody's Cook Book: A Comprehensive Manual of Home Cookery by Isabel Ely Lord). When it comes to "traditional" or "old fashioned," this isn't really true. This isn't a recipe that has been passed down by your family or anyone else's for generations because... Quite frankly it hasn't been around that long!

Crisps tend to incorporate baked apples with a batter of sugar, flour, oats, and nuts. It tends to be crispier than a cobbler, hence the name.

Apple Crumble

An apple crumble is much like an apple crisp, but without the oats or nuts. It's often compared more to a streusel with a crumbly dough of flour, sugar, and butter.

Apple Cobbler

Apple cobbler appears to be the original apple pie alternative. It's what a lot of recipes compare to. It's made out of biscuit dough and is named after its resemblance to cobblestone.

Apple Dowdy or Apple Pandowdy

Apple pandowdy is an older, more traditional Colonial recipe that made its cookbook debut in 1886 (Miss Corson's Practical American Cookery by Juliet Corson). It's more of a simplified apple pie where the crust is baked on top and then broken up to allow the apple to bubble through during the cooking process.

Apple Betty or Apple Brown Betty

Apple Betty is a Colonial recipe popularized in 1864 (Yale Literary Magazine), although its origins date back to the 1600's. It's believed to be adapted from the French Apple Charlotte. Apple Betty a baked dessert topped with buttered breadcrumbs or cubes. This absorbs a lot of the fruit and creates more of a pudding-like consistency.

Apple Charlotte

Apple Charlotte first appeared in print in an article in 1796 (New York Magazine). It's a moulded pudding recipe made out of buttered bread. It's believed to be named after Queen Charlotte, King George III's wife and a patron of apple growers.

Apple Grunt

Apple grunts are much like apple cobblers where they're a biscuit recipe. However, instead of being baked in the oven, they're cooked in a skillet on the stove.

Apple Slump

Apple slumps are also similar to an apple cobbler. Only, once they're cooked, they're flipped over so that the biscuit topping is on the bottom, instead of the top. It gets its name because the apples then slump over the side.

What Did I Decide to Make?

In my sheer and utter confusion to what the slight difference to all of these apple desserts was! I kind of just picked Apple Cobbler because it seemed to be more "traditional." Which, in hindsight, seems kind of ironic because this ended up really being more of a cake batter than anything resembling a biscuit! But I believe what this has taught us is that, it doesn't matter what you make as long as it contains apples and is easier than a pie!