Finally! Gourmet.com clears cobbler-family confusion.

A cobbler and a crisp are different things, no matter how many people use the terms interchangeably. Occasionally you'll hear "buckle" used in reference to either of these two, or less frequently, "brown Betty," which I'm sure is more common in the south (excuse the King of the Hill-informed stereotype). Luckily, the ever-informative Gourmet.com posted this (definitive?) list, distinguishing characteristics of each of these members of the cobbler-family, to steer our baking and eating endeavours toward greater PCdom. Here it is in full. Check back to the original piece for photos. They're incredibly helpful.

Think of a cobbler—fruit topped with a crust and baked—as a fruit pot pie. Most cobblers have a thick biscuit crust, which can either be cut into rounds (“cobbles”) or left as a single layer. Cobblers were originally made with a pie crust, and you can still find cooks in the American South who sandwich a fruit filling between a top and bottom crust made of pie dough. Eat a cobbler warm or cold, wrote Lettice Bryan in The Kentucky Housewife (1839). “Although it is not a fashionable pie for company, it is very excellent for family use.” A few of our favorite fillings for cobblers: stone fruit, sweet cherries, blackberries, apples, berries and brown sugar, or plums and almonds.

In a crisp, the fruit is sprinkled with a streusel-like mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and often oatmeal or nuts that has been rubbed together (or pulsed in a food processor). A crisp is called a crumble in Britain. Try our recipes for plum berry crisp, peach crisp, apple oatmeal crumble, and fall fruit crumble.

A brown Betty is similar to a crisp, but breadcrumbs are used, and they’re layered in with the fruit rather than scattered on top. Try a recipe for brown Betty with apples; add prunes; or make individual little brown Bettys.

In a buckle, the fruit is generally folded into (or sprinkled onto) cake batter and then covered with a topping similar to that found on a crisp; the cake batter will “buckle” as it bakes. Try our recipes for blueberry nectarine buckle, raspberry sour cream buckle, and lemon blueberry buckle (registration required).

A pandowdy is a deep-dish fruit dessert that originated in the hearth kitchen as a way to use up leftover dough (typically bread dough) on baking days. The thick crust, which would become as hard as a cracker, was then broken up and left to soak in the cooking juices. The end result was similar to a bread pudding. The pandowdy evolved with the times, and by the 1850s and ’60s, most women had switched to a biscuit crust, which had become the default crust for all baked and steamed fruit desserts. After the 1860s, both biscuit crusts and pie crusts were used. Up until the mid-20th century, apples were the only fruit and molasses the only sweetener used in pandowdies. Try our recipes for apricot pandowdy and old-fashioned apple pandowdy.