Southern Chef Virginia Willis Dishes on Her Grandmother's Blackberry Cobbler
Chef Virginia Willis will always remember taking afternoon strolls with her grandfather during the summertime. Along the way, they would pick delicious blackberries.
Blackberries grew wild in Georgia and when they brought them back home, her grandmother, Meme, would whip up her delicious cobbler.
The dessert, Virginia says, was a huge part of her life. "It represents so many memories. It represents being in her kitchen...it represents the walks with my grandfather, and it's dead simple and delicious."
Virginia Willis is a Southern chef and the acclaimed author of the cookbook Bon Appétit, Y’all! Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking.
Virginia has spent much of her life in the garden and the kitchen with her family. "I was practically born in a kitchen sink," she says.
When she was very young, she would sit in one side of the sink and shell butter beans with her mom. Her mother shared the same passion that her grandmother had for cooking.
Virginia says, Meme "was a force of nature."
From a farming community in the rural South, she fell in love with Virginia's grandfather at a fish fry. She was college educated and he had completed an eighth grade education.
"Looking at him when he was young, it was easy to see why my grandmother had her head turned from the college boys that she was dating," Virginia says. Her grandfather was tall and handsome and she says with a laugh, her grandmother "was very bossy."
Virginia's family always had huge gardens and would can and preserve fruits and vegetables.
"Every summer they would spend time "shucking corn, cutting corn, freezing corn, snapping beans, canning beans, freezing butter beans, making peach jelly and making blackberry jelly. You name it they did it," she says.
Virginia's next cookbook, Basic to Brilliant, Y'all: 150 Refined Southern Recipes and Ways to Dress Them Up for Company, comes out this fall.
Virginia shared her grandmother's blackberry recipe with us and says it can also be made with other kinds of fruit that are local and in season.
"Peaches, apricots and blueberries are good, and moving towards the fall, the harder fruits such as apples and pears can be used, but the fruit needs to be sliced either very thinly or par-cooked," she says.
Meme’s Blackberry Cobbler*
Serves 6 to 8
Wild blackberries grow prolifically throughout the South. No matter how hot the sun, when picking the musky, sweet-sour fruit it’s always a good idea to wear long sleeves and gloves. Huge brambles with thick canes like barbed wire protect the berries. In the fall, we’d put on our armor, grab a few buckets, and walk toward the pond, where the blackberries grew. My sister and I ate at least one berry for every berry that went into the bucket. We’d return an hour or so later with smiles and blackened teeth and sit in the kitchen as Meme made this homey dessert. Farm-raised blackberries are much larger than wild ones, and may be used instead if you are not able to find yourself a briar patch. Other fruit may be substituted, including sliced peaches, raspberries, blueberries, plums, cherries, and apricots.
To cobble means to hastily throw together. Cobblers come in a variety of styles: biscuit, pastry, crumb, and batter. This cobbler is a batter cobbler, which is an absolute snap to assemble. And, since it’s the one I grew up on, I consider it the best! The batter is poured into a hot cast-iron skillet and immediately crisps and swells.
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
4 cups fresh blackberries
1 cup sugar, plus more for sprinkling, if needed
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Pinch of fine sea salt
1 cup whole milk
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Whipped cream, crème fraîche, or ice cream, for accompaniment
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Melt the butter in a large cast-iron skillet or ovenproof baking dish in the oven, 5 to 7 minutes.
Place the blackberries in a large bowl. Using a potato masher, mash them to release some of the juices. If the berries are tart, sprinkle over some of the sugar.
To make the batter, in another bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the 1 cup sugar, milk, and vanilla extract, and stir until evenly blended. Remove the skillet from the oven and add the melted butter to the batter; stir to combine. Pour the batter all at once into the skillet, then add the blackberries and juices to the center of the batter.
Bake until the top is golden brown and a cake tester inserted into the batter comes out clean, about 1 hour. Serve, hot, warm, or at room temperature with whipped cream, crème fraîche, or ice cream.
Butter
Butter is simply over-whipped cream. In cream, the fat floats around in a water suspension. When the cream is whipped, the fat coagulates and the remaining liquid is buttermilk (see page 57). Whereas cream is an oil-in-water emulsion, after churning, the butter is a water-in-oil emulsion. This emulsion, butter, is a complex combination of milk fat, milk solids, and water. American butter contains at least 80 percent milk fat; some European or European-style butters contain between 82 and 88 percent milk fat. For simplicity and consistency of product, I use Land o’ Lakes unsalted butter in my recipes, preferring unsalted to salted, because you can always add salt, but you cannot take it out.
A few extra tips!
Who says Southern food can't be healthful?! To lighten things up:
Instead of 1/2 stick of butter, use 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter and 1/4 cup canola oil
Instead of 1 cup all-purpose flour, use 1 cup whole wheat pasty flour
Instead of 1 cup of whole milk and 1 cup of sugar, use 3/4 cup 2% milk and 1/3 cup agave syrup
More from the series "Every Recipe Tells a Story" here.
*Blackberry Cobbler photo and recipe reprinted with permission from Bon Appétit, Y’all: Recipes and Stories from Three Generations of Southern Cooking by Virginia Willis, copyright © 2008. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House. Photo credit: Ellen Silverman © 2008
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