Since I wrote about my Dad’s comforting beef curry, it’s only fair—especially since her birthday is this weekend—that I wax nostalgic about my mom’s peach cobbler recipe!

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I grew up in California—mostly in one town, but kinda all over the general area—and as a kid I loved to travel. Sure, there were the obvious Are We There Yet Are We There Yet Are We There Yets sprinkled throughout the driving part of the adventure, but I loved getting to be in new places, to see new things, and to meet new people, who did things differently from me.

More to the point, I loved eating new food in all of those new places!

As I got older, I learned exactly how big California is, and how little I had actually traveled, no matter how many times my family piled into the car, and drove four or eight or twelve hours in another direction. I took a couple of road trips with friends or friends’ bands as I got older, which at least got me out of state, but I was primarily a West Coast Girl most of my life.

In my early twenties, I made the biggest move of my life at the time (lols), but it was still only a lateral move metaphorically speaking, once again traversing the West coast to Portland, Oregon. And while it wasn’t technically a big move in the grand scheme of the United States or even the world, living in PDX necessitated either a very long road trip or an actual flight (and then another drive) to get back to my hometown. For those unfamiliar with the width and the breadth of the States, it was like traversing an entire European country…or five!

Anyhow, in addition to the famously persistent rain of the Pacific Northwest, I needed to adjust to the different personalities of Oregonians, and the different ways they did things. Since this is primarily a food blog, I should point out that I was not only amazed by the different local fruits & berries & vegetables in general, but by the distinctly different way of eating cobbler, in particular.

For one, peach cobbler was a homemade creation as far as I had ever known it, and one which was never seen in the restaurants of my youth. For another, it was always peach cobbler to me, always made with canned yellow cling peaches in heavy syrup¹, and that was just that. Discovering the Oregon specialty of cobbler made with freshly picked blackberries was like a religious moment to me, and one which I’ve quite literally never forgotten.

Most unusually to this supposedly well-traveled post~teen, the idea that there wasn’t just a cobbler, but many cobblers was mind blowing. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the wealth of crumbles and buckles and crisps and slumps which exist in the world! I mean, I was genuinely flabbergasted by the number of ways people made the “cobbler” part of their fruity creations…from the soft pancakey-like cobbler of my youth, to ones with more of a crumbly, scone-like topping, to ones baked up-side-down (from my perspective), with the fruit above and the pastry below!

To say the least, something which had been a simple, homemade special treat of my youth became a metaphor for bigger things. And something which was probably the very first thing I learned to bake with my mother turned into something which helped push me on to culinary school, and moving from front of the house jobs at restaurants to back of the house positions.

Mama’s peach cobbler is to me what the madeleine was to Proust.

While it was sadly lost in a fire, my mom used to have a mimeographed “cookbook” which had been made by my kindergarten teacher after all of the students were sat down individually, and asked to explain how we would make our favorite foods.

Of course, I chose peach cobbler, and I still remember telling my teacher Mrs. Stuckey how it was carefully crafted by my mother. The end results were predictably hilarious, including but not limited to putting it into “a really really hot oven, like 60 degrees” and cooking it for “such a very long time, maybe four or five hours”!

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Peach Base:

• 25 grams brown (or white) sugar
• 20 grams all-purpose flour
• ¼ tsp. cinnamon
• ¼ tsp. salt
• 75 grams peach syrup*
  (* separated from canned peaches)
• 1 Tbs. lemon juice*
  (*I use a plastic lemon full of juice when I don’t need a whole lemon!)
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• ~450 grams* canned peaches, separated from syrup
  (*the amount doesn’t need to be exact…I just eyeballed the amount of peaches I had after separating peaches from syrup, put most of the peaches into my pan, and saved some for the top…)

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Cobbler Topping:

• 125 grams all-purpose flour
• 25 grams brown (or white) sugar
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. baking soda
• ¼ tsp. salt
• a good~sized pinch of nutmeg
• 120 ml. milk (any kind okay, but I used whole milk)
• 50 ml. neutral oil
• 2 eggs
• ~100 grams canned peaches*
  (*see above)
• ~2 Tbs. of butter (semi~optional)

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Much like my Papa’s beef curry—which he taught me to make by sight & touch & taste, my Mom has given me her exact peach cobbler recipe² at least 94 times (What?? I lose shit!). After learning it almost by rote, I slowly began to tamper with this perceived perfection, making little tweaks & changes here and there, so that it still tasted like the peach cobbler of my youth, but that it was even simpler to make; it dirtied fewer dishes; it was adjusted for Japanese products & tiny kitchens; and it had been pushed and pulled gently in different directions to lean a little more into the things I liked most about it.

I hope you get even a little taste of that feeling by making it yourself.

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0. Read the recipe completely, and then come back to this step. Now turn on your oven to 200°C.

1. Start with a 19~21 cm. pan. I always use a glass pan, but that’s just because my mama always used a glass pan, so I don’t think it matters? Put the 25 grams brown sugar, the 20 grams of flour, the ¼ tsp. of cinnamon, and the ¼ tsp. of salt into the pan, and stir it to mix well. The idea is for the coarse sugar to keep the soft flour from getting lumpy in the following step.

I don’t think my mom ever used brown sugar or added cinnamon, but there used to be a particular kind of Southern Style canned peaches around the time I started baking this recipe for myself, which happened to have these flavors in the syrup, and I. loved. them. so. much. that I not only ate them out of cans—raise your hand if that was a childhood snack for you, too—but started using them in this heretofore un~fucked~with recipe.

2. Add the 75 grams of peach juice, leftover from one of the cans—feel free to drink the rest; I’m not one to judge!—the 1 Tbs. of lemon juice, and the 1 tsp. of vanilla extract, and stir until everything is smooth and well-mixed. I like to use a fork for this, but that’s just me.

3. Add the roughly 450 grams of canned peaches to the juice mix, and stir until the peaches are evenly coated. As a semi~optional step, you can take a Tbsp. or two of butter, and plop little blobs over the peaches, dotting them with yumminess, and helping the peach juice become silkier as it bakes and then cools.
Note: you can use peach halves or slices or chunks here, but I tend toward slices, because anything else feels weird to me. However, peach chunks tend to be easier for smaller kids. Either way, you do you.

4. Set aside the glass pan, and grab a medium-sized bowl to make the topping. Put all of the dry ingredients (the 125 grams of flour, 25 grams of brown sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. of baking soda, the one quarter teaspoon of salt, and the pinch of nutmeg) into the bowl and whisk them to combine. Yay! Our dry ingredients are mixed!

5. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients, where we will plop in the 2 eggs, the 50 ml. of oil, and the 120 ml. of milk. Whisk together the liquid ingredients first (as best you can), and then incorporate the dry ingredients as you stir.

6. Stir this new mixture until it’s smooth, like pancake batter. It’s okay if there are a couple of lumps. Yay! Our cobbler batter is mixed!

7. Okay? Let’s put this shit together! Evenly pour the batter into the glass pan, over the peach mixture. You shouldn’t need to spread it out or anything.

8. Finally, take your remaining ~100 grams of peaches (however you decided that you would like to cut them up) and evenly drop them atop the batter. This was defo not a step my Mom ever did, but I’ve always liked it when a few peaches peek out of the batter, so I like to do this step, poke the peach slices alllmost all of the way down, but not quite, sprinkle a little coarse sugar on top, and then pop it into the oven.

9. As I’m fond of reminding you, all ovens have their own little quirks and like to cook things differently, so keep like one eye on this. We’re going to start at the high temp of 200°C to get the batter to poof up and then brown. My oven takes between 10~15 minutes to do this, but yours may go faster or slower, and you may need to turn the pan halfway through so that it browns evenly.

Anywhoozle, once the cobbler batter has risen and browned fairly well, we want to turn down the oven to a softer 160°C to allow it to finish cooking through without browning too much.

This part can take a while, but you still want to keep an eye on it…there’s no sure sign of doneness, but if you see that the center has proofed up at least as much as the edges, it feels kinda boingy-boingy, the corners are brown all the way down, and thickened peach juice which looks kinda like jam is staring to bubble up around the edges, then it’s go time for the old skewer trick™…this is the final check for doneness, where you slowly slide something small (like a skewer or thin knife blade) into and then out of the batter, making sure no raw batter comes out along with it. Just remember to test the actual batter near the center (which takes the longest to cook) and try not to poke through a peach.

If you do meet the conditions above, but the skewer comes out gooey, no worries. Put the cobbler back into the oven for five to ten minutes at a time, trying the old skewer trick™ (in a different location each time!) until the skewer or knife slides out clean. Don’t worry if it takes some time. You got this!

I think the hardest part of this recipe is waiting for it to cool before you slice into it. For one, everything needs time to set up—especially the peaches & juice mixture—so that it’s all the right texture and consistency. For another thing, if you try to eat it now, it will burn your face off.

I don’t usually serve my peach cobbler with anything, as anything you add to it will simply detract from the subtle flavors, in my opinion. My mom and my older brother used to pour milk over theirs, but they’re both weirdos, so there’s that.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or if you made this recipe in the comments section below. You don’t even need to log in or anything to comment! And also as always, I especially like likes!

Go forth and cook, my friends! Be kind to one another, but don’t put up with any shit either. See you next time!

1. For this recipe, I used four small cans of yellow peaches, which are a bit more difficult to find in Japan than the more ubiquitous white peaches. You can use whichever you like, but I personally find white peaches a bit too sweet for cobbler. ↩︎
2. If I recall my mom’s old paper index card recipe correctly, it’s very possible that the original version of this recipe should actually be attributed to a person named Sally Andrews…or to the back of a 1970s box of pancake mix. ↩︎