A Taste of Summer

A Dram of Nectar

The summer sun spilled into my grandmother's kitchen, making cookie-cutter patterns on the tiled floor. "There is no dessert as delicious as a peach Brown Betty," she told me as she taught me how to make it. I believed her, and my mouth watered with anticipation. She first showed me how to mash together the brown sugar, butter, oatmeal, flour, and cinnamon she used as a topping. She always used a fork for this, never her fingers, as I do now. Then with quick wrist movements, she cut each of the peaches in slices, dropping them into a buttered baking dish. Last came the topping, which she crumbled evenly over the fruit.

A gourmet cook and a shameless Francophile, even during the popular prefab years of the jingoistic McCarthy era, my grandmother never used canned fruits or vegetables in cooking. I don't believe she ever opened a TV dinner. Instead, she loved to make poulet ô l'estragon and potato gratin with rosemary and sage from her garden. She cooked only fresh foods in her black-and-white tiled kitchen, trimmed in red with chrome accents. It was a Fifties kitchen that seemed embarrassingly dated to the leather-toned sensibilities of my Seventies eyes. However, my grandmother had an innate sense of style, and so she must have known that one day her kitchen would be fashionable again. When she sold the house 10 years ago, it was the kitchen the buyers wanted.

I do not know where she learned the Brown Betty recipe, probably not from her own mother, who died when my grandmother was still a girl. But perhaps from her grandmother, or even my grandfather's mother, it doesn't really matter. The Brown Betty recipe is very old, and because of that, there are many variations. Some cookbooks claim that it originated in the South, in Arkansas. Others claim that, like the cobbler, the recipe sailed over with the early Scotch-Irish colonists. It is almost certainly a modification of the pandowdy, a deep-dish fruit dessert that falls midway between pie and cobbler. And it is like a cobbler, but with a simpler, crisp crust rather than a biscuit crust. With a total cooking time of less than one hour, it is one of the easiest of all desserts to make. It can be prepared in a cast-iron skillet, in an oven, or over an open fire. It does not require a constant, even temperature, like a cake. It is difficult to burn or spoil. And my grandmother was right: It is also delicious.

Although Brown Betty can be exquisite with almost any summer fruit, I believe it finds its most perfect expression with the peach -- the fruit, that according to Victor Hugo:

Seduces all men's eyes

And their senses gratifies.

The embodiment of summer, a ripe peach is like a dram of nectar, a honeyed taste of pure ambrosia. Once baked in a Brown Betty, the buttery, soft-fleshed peach melts into brown-sugared crisp. And cinnamon, brown-sugared crisp reduces to a sweet-tart syrup. Served with vanilla ice cream, the parts form an almost elemental bond, transforming a simple dessert into a complex Thing. "Who would ever think that this simple, old favorite could turn into a sophisticated tea dish?" wrote Marion Becker in the 1960s edition of Joy of Cooking. I have made this dessert for my family, for dinner parties, picnics, and catered events. It never fails to satisfy the guests. My mother still makes it, to general acclaim at every baking.

Sadly, my grandmother is now too senile to cook at all. On summer days, instead of working in her garden, she looks at the fashion ads in the Times, then falls asleep in front of the television. The peach Brown Betty recipe has long slipped from her loosening memory. That summer day in the kitchen has settled into unswept cerebral corners. But for me, who still holds the memory in a tidy spot, a peach Brown Betty will always evoke the summer sun, and grandmothers, and a timeless black-and-white tiled kitchen, trimmed in red with chrome accents.