It was a delightful conversation with the cheerful man from Mississippi.
First, I must tell you how I got to that point. Emily Mullinax had given me two cookbooks, which she said she doesn’t need because she doesn’t cook.
She couldn’t have found a better home for them because I read cookbooks like some people read novels. One was from Jackson, Miss., and in it was a recipe for peach cobbler. There are a lot of recipes for this, but I liked this one and went searching for the contributor, Mrs Chick Warner of Vicksburg, Miss. There are several peach orchards in the area, I learned, but no large packing houses as we have in some areas of South Carolina.
“Are you a Baptist?” I asked “Mr. Chick” (short for Chichester, in England, you know) Warner. Nooooo, he answered, but his wife was when they married. Then she became a Presbyterian. Why, I wondered but didn’t ask, didn’t he become a Baptist?
Anyway, Chick and I were instantly on a first-name basis. He declared that his wife Peggy is the best cook anywhere. Chick’s wife (I never did talk with Mrs. Warner) got the recipe from her mother Ruth from Wisner, La.
The Warners have two daughters – Tara and her husband Charles Cannada, and Blythe and her husband Richard McCoy. Each daughter has two children and I’m pretty sure they like their grandmother’s peach cobbler.
The recipe asked for nine peaches. I always follow instructions and used nine, but that was too many because there was too much juice in the pie. But then, I was using big ole South Carolina peaches, and I think six or seven would have been enough. I liked the baked pastry strips in the middle of the pie. When you get to the top, you almost need an engineering degree to make a lattice crust. If you can’t do the lattice design, simply lay on the strips.
We thank our new Baptist/Presbyterian friend for sharing the Louisiana/Mississippi recipe.
I think you could use frozen peaches if your local fresh peaches are gone. Whichever you choose, do make this pie one Saturday or before you go to church on Sunday to be enjoyed by everyone at your table for … Sunday Dinner.
Peach Cobbler
Pastry
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup shortening
¼ teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons ice water
Combine the flour, shortening and salt with a pastry blender. Add the ice water and form into dough. Wrap in waxed paper and chill. When ready to make the pie, roll the pastry and cut into strips. Reserve enough strips to make a lattice top for pie, and place remaining strips on cookie sheet. Bake at 450 degrees for 8-10 minutes until crisp. Don’t burn!
Filling
½ cup butter
1½ cups water
2 tablespoons flour
Pinch salt
9 (or less) peaches, peeled and sliced
1½ cups sugar
Dash of cinnamon or nutmeg
Mix peaches, butter, and water in saucepan and bring to a boil. Reserve a little of the sugar to sprinkle on top of cobbler. Combine the remaining sugar, flour, cinnamon or nutmeg, and salt and stir into the boiling peach mixture until dissolved.
Grease an 8½ x 9½ inch baking dish and pour in one half of the peach mixture. Top with the baked pastry strips. Add remaining peach mixture and use remaining pastry strips to make a lattice top. Sprinkle with reserved sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees for 35-40 minutes. Delicious served warm with cream. Serves 8.