Thinking of Apple Pastry

I've had apple cake and its relatives in mind a lot this fall. You could make a different apple treat every day. Apple omelets are great. Caramel apples. Baked apples (or microwaved apples that look and taste like baked apples). Apple bread pudding. Fried apple slices as a side dish to various savory meat. All kinds of salads -- the most conventional being Waldorf salad. Instant chutney from chopped apples, canned whole-berry cranberry sauce, and candied ginger.

And then there's pastry.

An article in Gourmet magazine online today offers more refined definitions of some apple-pastry terms I discussed recently in Crisp, Crumble, Cobbler.

The Gourmet write-up, Can a Man Have Too Many Apples? by Robert Pincus, inspired me to do further research in hopes of a more complete grasp of the possibilities of apple pastry. Versions of most of these also are sometimes made with other fruit -- peaches, plums, pears, etc. I mostly googled around to find ideas.

Here is my list:

Cobbler: "sliced apples tossed with sugar and baked under a biscuit crust made from flour, sugar, milk, a little butter, and baking powder, kneaded until it’s smooth." (Gourmet)

Crisp: "fruit baked under a loose amalgam of flour, sugar, butter, and ground nuts." (Gourmet)

Crumble: "the English version of the crisp in which the flour is replaced by oats and the sugar is brown." (Gourmet)

Grunt: "like cobbler but made on the stovetop in a cast-iron skillet." (Gourmet)

Brown Betty: apples layered with brown sugar and spice mixture & raisins in a pan lined with bread crumbs, topped with crumbs (according to my ancient copy of The Joy of Cooking).

Pandowdy or Pandowny: like an upside down cake: batter poured over sliced apples, baked, and turned over (random websites).

Slumps: appear to be like pandowny/pandowdy; apple slump recipes are often attributed to Louisa May Alcott (also random websites).

Apple duffs: whole apples wrapped in puff pastry and baked -- sometimes called Irish apple duffs (again random websites).

Turnovers or chausson aux pommes: American turnovers may be made with pie dough, but the French version, chausson aux pommes, consists of pre-cooked apples in a puff pastry. The famous bakery Poilane in Paris probably makes the most fabulous French version -- sometimes with the filling sort of in the open.

Apple cake or coffee cake: the Joy of Cooking offers lots and lots of recipes that involve cake filled with apples, topped with apples, etc. So do many other cookbooks -- every culture where apples grow has a version. My fellow blogger Jen posted a delicious-sounding one this week: Cinnamon-Apple Coffeecake.

Apple pie: no definition needed.