An illustrated story about why I weigh

There was a very lively discussion (that’s how polite people describe the godawful mess of insults and putdowns often a part of newsgroups) recently on a food and cooking group about whether it is easier to measure or to weigh. I come down firmly on the side of weighing.

I don’t really care how anyone else cooks, but I consistently teach weighing while at the same time providing recipes that work both ways. I’ve almost ten years experience by now of doing both at the same time, and I’ve become so convinced that weighing is easier that I have scratched in the weights on the ancient USA cookbooks I hauled over the ocean, at least for those recipes I actually use.

I decided to create a recipe that I could photograph step by step showing how it works.

Hot Plum Cobbler

That’s my dish ready to eat, steaming hot. I call it plum cobbler, because cobbler is the name for something thrown together, cobbled together, made with little care. That fits. I have a cookbook from the early 1950s in which the author recommends fruit desserts for health reasons. Nowadays she would call you bad names for eating dessert at all, but back then and for some years later it was still respectable to make and eat sweets for after dinner. Imagine that. My mother made a dessert almost every single day, and she made two or three pies every Saturday morning. As a result we had a lot of drop in company. A cup of coffee and something from my mother’s treasurehouse of desserts was always a probability, if you couldn’t stay for a meal. I’m not sure why things have changed so much, but they surely have. Anyway, here’s hot fruit cobbler, good for you, body and soul, and it takes no time at all.

Preheat the oven to 200°C or 400° F.

I put a mixing bowl on the scale and press the tare button. As you can see, I can do this in grams or ounces.

In that bowl are:
260 g/9.17 oz. flour
tare
75 g/ 2.64 oz. shortening (lard here)
tare
a fistful of sugar
3 teaspoons of baking powder (I just use spoons from place settings)
1/2 teaspoon salt

Those were cut together with a fork because my food processor feed is broken. I am seriously discommoded by that, too. As you can see, they look sort of mealy.

To that I added 157.5 ml/ 2/3 cup milk and stirred it in with the fork. I tossed some flour onto the counter, scraped the dough onto it and kneaded it just a few times to be sure there were no lumps of whatever. Then I patted it out to about 5/8″ to 3/4″ thick, or about 1.5 to 2 cm.

I put some plums I froze last year into a shallow baking dish. They were frozen in a light syrup so I added no sugar. I did dust a little cinnamon over them. I cut about 29 g/1 ounce of butter in small pieces over the plums.

I mixed up some cinnamon sugar. I didn’t measure it at all, because I am so daring and wild.

I cut the dough into squares and rolled the pieces in the cinnamon sugar then placed at random on top of the plums. I popped this into the hot oven for about 20 minutes and it came out like the first photo. I plan to serve it hot to the neighbors with some unwhipped and unsweetened cream.

This was all the mess I made. It took me 30 seconds to scrape and wash the counter and 1 minute 50 seconds to wash, rinse and stack to dry the dishes.

You can make cobbler from any cookable fruit. I love rhubarb cobbler to distraction, and peach with blackberry is a real classic. Every fruit deserves its own treatment, however, so remember how things tasted when someone kind cooked them for you and try to copy that taste. The important thing is to occasionally spend the ten or fifteen minutes to make something hot from your own oven, something with no preservatives, no enhancers and no chemicals. Will it kill us? I don’t think so. No one eats dessert much anymore and we are less healthy than our grandparents were in general.

I probably wouldn’t serve this at a fancy dinner, or maybe I would because I think something real and homemade might be fancier than something made from frozen puff pastry and prewhipped cream. Mostly I make this kind of thing as homely, wintery weather treats for people who have just stomped into the warm kitchen from the drizzly outdoors. Like your kids? Send them over! Or make cobbler yourself, the easy way.

Twelve minutes from start to the oven, I swear.