Peach Cobbler: The Internets to the Rescue

It's been a glorious peach season, but now we're starting to encounter dubious peaches—mushy and mealy despite their exterior perfection. The season is coming to an end. What better time to make peach cobbler, a dish that turns questionable fruit into a wonderful end-of-summer dessert?

We've tried many recipes for cobbler over the years but have always particularly loved a recipe from an old Sunset magazine that used a rolled-out cream-cheese crust. Alas, when we looked for it yesterday, we realized that the recipe had been inadvertently purged during our move last year.

Surely we'd be able to find it online, we thought. But it was nowhere to be found—not even in the Sunset recipe archives. There were lots of cobbler recipes online that mixed cream cheese with the peaches before baking, but that wasn't what we wanted.

Finally, we came upon a recipe with a wacky-sounding crust that featured boiling water in place of  the usual milk or buttermilk. We might have rejected it out of hand, but it was overwhelmingly popular with the readers of AllRecipes.com; in fact, an astonishing 22,000 people had saved it. So we decided to try it.

The resulting cobbler was delicious: fruit-heavy, the way we like it, with a sweet but not cloying crust. We would definitely make it again . . . even though we're still going to search for that elusive recipe for the cream-cheese crust.