Blackberry Cobbler

This Independence Day, Brian and I joined the rest of my family for a supper-duper over-the-top American day: we went to a baseball game (the Grand Prairie Airhogs) and there were fireworks following the game (at Lone Star Park). I don't know if is because Independence Day was this week, or just because Brian and I were at Farmer's Market last Sunday and every single booth had buckets and buckets of blackberries, but I decided I wanted to make a blackberry cobbler. Blackberry Cobbler just seems so American to me. More so than apple pie. I've never made an apple pie, and to be honest, I'm not always a huge fan of them.

The librarian in me decided to do some research:

The blackberry is a trailing-to-erect bramble,
usually spiny, in the genus Rubus of the family Rosaceae (rose). Blackberries occur throughout the world, with the exception of dry desert regions, but the greatest number are in the Northern Hemisphere. Commercial production is largely limited to the United States, where the principal producers are Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Important types are Thornless Evergreen, Marion, Boysen, Olallie, Cherokee, Comanche, Cheyenne, Humble, and Darrow. Loganberry is a trailing type with purplish fruit that is different in many respects from other blackberries; most taxonomists consider it a true and separate species.

copied from: Moore, J. N. "blackberry." Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.
Grolier Online http://gme.grolier.com/cgi-bin/article?assetid=0034920-0
(accessed June 30, 2008).

According the same online encyclopedia, Europe produces more apples than the U.S., however most of those apples go to making Cider and Brandy (those smart Europeans). Also, according to What's Cooking America, apple pies pre-date the U.S. by a couple hundred years.

A lot of people ask me if the Internet will make libraries and books obsolete. If anything, I think the Internet has helped libraries and books. It shows how overwhelming the volume of information is out there, and many people would prefer to have a professional sift through it for them (at least in my library). Also, according to the Association of American Publishers, the "U.S. publishers had net sales of $25 billion in 2007; a 3.2 percent increase from 2006 with a compound growth rate of 2.5 percent per year since 2002." So, no, we're not hurting. I will admit that I almost always turn to the Internet at the beginning of a reference interview, and often find all the info I need to pass on to them on either the Internet or an online database. However, I feel so dumb when someone asks a factual question, and I turn to the Internet first and spend way too much trying to find a legitamate site, instead of just pulling out the World Almanac and Book of Facts, where I can find the answer in seconds.

So here I am sitting at home, googling "blackberry cobbler" which pulls up over 83,000 hits. Now I'm sure there are some great recipes there. However, on my day off, I don't feel like sifting through them. On a whim, I get off my butt, walk over to my cookbook shelf, and pull out the big yellow Gourmet cookbook. And what do you know, right there in the index "cobbler, blackberry 815-816." It is the only cobbler in the big book, and it happens to be exactly the kind I want to make. If you can't trust Ruth Reichl when it comes to food, who can you trust?

I didn't make it in the cast iron skillet, but overall it was okay. I wanted more dough. I added some cinnamon to it. Some ginger would have been a nice addition to the blackberries.