Top That: My 5 Favorite Toppings for Baked Fruit Desserts

It's that time of year again. Time to start the fruit-based desserts for spring! I harvested the first of the rhubarb this morning. We'll mix rhubarb desserts with frozen pear, frozen plum, and frozen cherry desserts until the berries begin in mid to late June.

I thought I'd share my 5 favorite fruit dessert toppings and which fruits we enjoy them most on.

Streusel Crumb Topping

Streusel crumb topping is fine in texture and does best on firm fruits, where it won't fall beneath the surface of fruit. Think apple, pear, apple-blackberry, or apple-raspberry. I used this on a liquidy rhubarb and the crumb topping sunk beneath the surface on half of the individual cups of dessert. 

In addition to fruit crumbles, I use this to top pies, such as rhubarb-custard pie or Dutch apple pie. 

1 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter, softened
pinch salt (optional)

Stir together dry ingredients. Cut in butter. Add a teaspoon of water to moisten. Bake on top of fruit filling until golden brown.

Enough for one fruit pie, a 9 X 12 baking dish of fruit crumble, or 10 individual custard cups of fruit crumble. If not using the full amount, store the remaining crumb topping in the refrigerator up to 3 months.

Crisp Oat Topping

An oat crumb topping works well on juicy fruits, such as stone fruits, berries, apples, pears, and rhubarb for making fruit crisps. The juices of the fruits soften the oats somewhat and add a nice texture.

If using this on apple crisp, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon cinnamon can be added to the crumb mixture. If using on a pear crisp, 1/2 teaspoon ginger can be added to the mixture.

1 cup flour

3/4 cup sugar, can be brown sugar

1/4 teaspoon  salt

1/2 cup shortening, butter, or vegetable oil

1 cup uncooked oats

Combine flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in shortening/butter. Stir in oats. Store in refrigerator in covered container up to 3 months, if not using full amount. For example, individual custard cups of crisp can be made 2 to 4 at a time, reserving remaining topping mix for future desserts.

For a 8 X 8 or 9 X 9 fruit crisp, top 4 cups of sweetened and thickened fruit filling with Crisp Oat Topping mix. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes at 375 degrees F, or until topping is golden.

French Cobbler Topping

What makes this French is an egg-based topping. It's delicious with cherries, raspberries, plums, rhubarb, and apples. This is my most commonly used cobbler topping. It has a cake-like texture, as opposed to a traditional American biscuit texture.

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons butter, softened

1 egg, slightly beaten

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in butter. Stir in egg.

To make a 9 X 9 or 8 X 8 French fruit cobbler:

Combine 4 to 5 cups fruit, sugar to sweeten, pinch, salt, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract  and 1/2 cinnamon if desired. Spoon into buttered baking dish. Dollop fruit with batter above. Bake at 350 degrees F for 35 to 40 minutes, until topping is golden and firm to finger press.

Scone Topping

I love make individual cobblers topped with scone dough. Since scones don't take long to bake, I use this on a pre-cooked fruit filling. Because the scone dough is firm, this works well where fruit may be very liquidy, such as topping rhubarb compote or even leftover rhubarb sauce.

This recipe is actually our family's scone recipe. I found it in an English country cooking cookbook years ago. I make this as plain scones or as bramble scones, adding fresh blackberries and cutting the milk to 2 tablespoons.

3/4 cup flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 tablespoon sugar

3 tablespoons butter

3 tablespoons milk or cream.

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in butter. Stir together with milk/cream until a dough forms, adding a little extra milk, if needed. 

Cut dough into small rounds or wedges (2 large rounds patted out, cut into 4-6 wedges each).

To use Scone Topping, fill a butter 8 X 8 baking dish half full with sweetened and thickened cooked fruit filling. Top with cut scones. Bake at 385 for 15 minutes, until scones are golden and firm. The recipe can be halved for making 4 individual servings in custard cups, or remaining scone dough can be baked as scones on a baking sheet.

Drop Biscuit Topping

This is the topping that I've always known for peach cobbler, using juicy and sweet summer peaches. The recipe comes from my mother. It's how she made peach cobbler. The topping is only sweetened by a sprinkling of sugar over the batter. Topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a serving of this peach cobbler is summer in a bowl. 

2 cups flour

1 Tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 Tablespoons shortening or butter

3/4 cup milk

1 Tablespoon sugar

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in shortening or butter. Stir in milk. Should be a very thick batter.

To male a Drop Biscuit Cobbler, fill 8 X 12 or 7 X 11 buttered baking dish half full with sweetened, uncooked fruit (such as apple or fresh peach) filling. Drop biscuit dough in 8 portions, spaced evenly over the top of the fruit. Sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 degrees F and continue baking until topping is firm and golden brown, about 20 to 25 minutes. 

If using canned peaches, bake at 425 degrees F for 15 to 20 minutes.

Just some notes:

You can substitute whole wheat flour for part of the all-purpose flour. I usually sub 1/4 whole wheat to 3/4 white, and it's pretty much undetectable. In the French cobbler topping, if I sub some whole wheat, I use brown sugar in place of white. I think the pairing of brown sugar with whole wheat flour is nice. Made that way, this is my favorite topping for blackberry cobbler in the very late summer.

For all of the toppings but the French cobbler topping, you can mix up the dry ingredients plus butter and make just a couple of individual servings in custard cups and store the remaining topping mixture in the fridge for up to 3 months, then make more individual servings another day. I actually prefer the individual custard cup fruit desserts as it helps with portion control, and they bake in less time. The reason the French cobbler topping doesn't work as well doing half now, half another day if it's more troublesome to halve an egg, and you can't keep a fully mixed batter in the fridge for more than a day. (The baking powder will fizzle out once moistened by the egg, and the raw egg should be cooked within a day or two.)

I do both pre-cooked fillings and uncooked fresh or frozen fruits as the fillings. Pre-cooking the filling helps me get the consistency right, while uncooked fruit means I have one less step to take to baking the dessert. Canned fruit, such as canned peaches, can be used in place of fresh with good results.

One last option, if for some reason you don't have a working oven, you're camping, or you want to keep the kitchen cooler, you can make cobblers on the stove, in the way chicken and dumplings are made. This is called a grunt. Cook the filling in a dutch oven or cast iron skillet. Once the filling is cooked and bubbling, drop biscuit dough (the French cobbler batter, drop biscuit batter, or scone dough batter thinned just slightly with extra milk or cream so that it will "drop") onto the fruit. Cover the pot or pan and allow the biscuit dough to steam over low to medium flame. The dumplings should be puffed and firm in about 15 minutes. The most traditional grunt is made with blueberries, although plums, cherries, peaches, apples, rhubarb, or blackberries also make good grunts. 

Happy baking, friends!

Do you know why I read cookbooks from the 1930s and 1940s?

What it is not. It is not nostalgia. It is not a passing fancy. It's not mere curiosity.

It is because I feel there are lessons to be learned from the ways of cooking and eating from those decades. 

This was a time of increasing knowledge of nutrition and the effects of poverty on life expectancy and health. This knowledge was shared with society through cookbooks, women's magazines, government-led education efforts (leaflets, flyers, films), radio broadcasts, and through student coursework. Cookbooks were a direct avenue to educate homemakers about how to cook to preserve nutrients, as well as what foods to include in meals to boost health.

Experts didn't getting everything right, though. To solve the problem of widespread hunger during the Great Depression, processed foods were pushed. Refined flours were thought to be a godsend. They kept longer, and whatever nutrients were lost in processing could just be added back (enriched). We now know that eating foods as close to how they are found in nature is actually better for long term health. We also believed that margarine would be not only just as good as butter, but even better for us. Today we know the dangers of trans fats. It was widely believed that canned foods were more hygienic that fresh produce and something of a modern miracle. To be certain, eating a can of beans is better than eating nothing. And perhaps hunger in the immediacy was more critical than long term health during a period of prolonged financial lack.

As I read these older cookbooks, I study not only what I believe they got right, but I also pay attention to where they were wrong. It's an important lesson to see where someone else believed in something that later was revealed to be wrong. (Does DDT come to mind?) It helps me question what today's "experts" are claiming is good for me and think it through for myself.

It seems to me, in all of our advancements, we've lost sight of what great nutrition looks like. We fill our grocery carts with processed foods. We are too busy to cook at home so we choose meals out that may rely on just as many convenience or enhancement products or chemicals. Do we read the labels on the loaf of bread we put in our shopping cart? Why does grocery store bread not grow mold after a week, whereas my homemade bread does? Is it really a great idea to eat preservative-laden foods? Are we just fooling ourselves to think that just because there's no visible mold on the commercial bread slice that of course it must be just as nutritious as the day it was baked? Bread begins to lose nutrients within about a week of baking, notably vitamins and antioxidants, if not frozen. 

These older cookbooks feature recipes that rely on foods as close to nature as we're likely to find in a grocery store. And the ingredient list is almost always limited to simple and easy to find products. During WW2, the British government studied the health and lifespan of its citizenry, comparing pre-war to post-war. Throughout the war, due to the inability to import as much food, they strongly encouraged people to grow food in whatever piece of dirt they had. The minister of food promoted heavy use of homegrown produce to stretch what little could be bought in shops. The population had a diet for several years that was much heavier in fruits and vegetables than had previously been seen (prior to the war). Throughout the war, the health of the population was monitored and evaluated. When the war came to an end, they observed a decline in infant mortality, an increased lifespan, and better overall nutritional health. So I look at this information and I see that they got something very right.

My mother recalled that after school snacks were limited to apples, bread, and water. Desserts were limited to Sunday dinners. My father recalled similar things about how they ate during both the depression and World War 2. The only beverages allowed at meals were orange or carrot juice at breakfast, milk or water at lunch and dinner. Sweetened drinks (homemade lemonade primarily) were for parties. Desserts in my father's childhood home almost always contained fruit. Chocolate bars were a rarity. The one junkier food that my father's family enjoyed often were potato chips. Every Saturday at lunch, he and his 4 siblings had a sandwich with potato chips. Weekday lunches contained some sort of sandwich, a piece of fruit, some raw vegetables, and he drank water from the fountain. After school, the kids in my father's family enjoyed bread and jam, a carrot, or a glass of milk as a snack before completing chores and homework. There were no energy bars, fruit snacks, pop-tarts, string cheese, yogurt cups, or granola bars. It's my understanding that the adults in my parents's respective families rarely snacked. And the kitchen was "open" for breakfast, lunch, after school snacks for kids, and dinner. At all other hours of the day the entire family knew the kitchen was "closed" to grazing. These older cookbooks rarely have any mention of snack recipes. The menus are explicitly for the "3 squares" a day.

Modern day commercial snack foods are often more expensive and lower in overall nutrients than regular meal foods. So following a pattern of eating much like those followed in the 30s and 40s should save money and improve my nutrient profile. When I want a snack, I typically have a spoonful of peanut butter, a slice of bread, or a piece of fruit or handful of raisins. By avoiding buying processed foods at the grocery store, I am forced into reliance on nutrient-dense foods that I do purchase or grow.

The other aspect that I really appreciate about these older cookbooks is their simple ingredient lists for each recipe. These recipes, for the most part (ignoring recipes like mock apple pie, a la Ritz crackers), call for the most basic ingredients, produce, meat, milk, cheese, eggs, common seasonings, herbs and spices, basic starchy foods, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, grains and other baking ingredients, and basic condiments such as vinegar, mustard, catsup, mayonnaise, pickles and relishes (often homemade), jams and jellies, horseradish, and chili sauce (like catsup, but less sweet, more spicy, and chunkier -- my grandmother loved chili sauce). With my digestive issues, I know which of those mentioned foods I can actually eat and not have after effects. A lot of modern recipes use at least one convenience food. It may be a can of prepared soup or a jarred sauce or a bag of tater tots. I avoid most convenience foods, sometimes because of an actual food contained (like milk) and sometimes because of an additive (like guar gum or methylcellulose).

And as a side benefit to simpler ingredient lists, almost all of these recipes are less expensive to make than buying similar convenience or prepared foods. Cooking simpler recipes is a large part of how I keep our grocery budget low. (Not buying convenience snack foods is the other part.) I save money, we eat better than we would otherwise, and I am hoping for a longer health-span for me and my family members.

I learn so much by studying these older cookbooks. In my quest to master extreme resourcefulness, frugality, and creativity born of necessity, I find these cookbooks to be blue prints of sorts in how to craft meal plans while providing nourishment and comfort from humble ingredients.