At any rate, here is a working classification on fruit desserts because this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
Cobblers, Crisps, Crumbles, Grunts, Slumps, Bettys, Buckles, and Pandowdies
- Cobbler: fruit topped with a crust and baked. Think of cobbler like a fruit pot pie. There are two main styles of cobbler - those with a rolled-out, solid layer of top crust (sometimes much like a one-crust pie, only with the crust on the top instead of the bottom), and those that are topped with "cobbles," or rounds of dough. This latter style is usually made with a tender, sweet biscuit dough, and these are my favorite. These rounds can be cut-out circles of rolled dough, but my much-preferred way is to make the cobbles like drop biscuits, randomly scattering small globs of delicious dough at intervals over the fruit. These will bake into delicious irregular craggy biscuits over your jammy fruit.
- Crisp: fruit sprinkled with a streusel; a mixture of butter, sugar (usually brown), flour, and often oatmeal or finely chopped nuts. This mixture is usually rubbed together with fingertips, or pulsed together in a food processor. (See Crumble).
- Crumble: Some sources that a crumble is merely the British name for a crisp. Other sources I've read claim that if the topping involves oats, it's a crisp, but if it's just a traditional streusel mixture (no oats), it's a crumble.
- Grunt: a form of cobbler in which the fruit is first cooked on the stove top ("stewed"), then cobbles of biscuit dough are dropped over that, and the dish bakes just long enough to bake the crust. This is the only one in which the fruit is pre-cooked. Supposedly named for the sound it makes when the fruit bubbles up through the crust while it's baking. A Slump is another name for a grunt - I believe grunt is more common in the south, slump in the northeast.
- Brown Betty: baked fruit like a crisp, except uses buttered chunks of bread or breadcrumbs instead of streusel, which is layered with the fruit rather than being laid on top.
- Buckle: the fruit is folded into a plain yellow cake batter, which is then covered with a streusel topping (no oats). This cake batter needs to be fairly stiff, almost like a cookie dough. The classic version is Blueberry Buckle.
- Pandowdy: a deep-dish cobbler in which the top crust is broken up into an uneven layer (hence "dowdy"), with some bits of crust sunk into the fruit to absorb juices. This 19th century dessert was originally made with apples, and sweetened with molasses or maple syrup. That top crust can actually be either a rolled pie crust, or a cobbler-style dough, or even a more cake-like batter. Martha Stewart has a recipe that rolls out a pie crust, cuts it into squares, and lays those raw on top of the fruit, then the whole thing is baked. Other sources say you bake a solid layer of whichever type of top crust first, then break up the surface to submerge some of the pieces.
- Sonker: a cobbler containing a high fruit-to-dough ratio, often mixed fruit. This is a very regional Southern dish, indigenous to Mt. Airy, NC according to Alton Brown, though I thought the peach sonker was a Georgia thing.
