When I was 16 and got my driver’s license, I’d often pile friends into my silver VW bug for Sunday road trips. Our destination: Julian, to sit in a pine-paneled diner and eat apple pie. Julian, a historic gold mining town known for its apples and apple pie, is about 60 miles northeast of San Diego, where I grew up.
The trips were an expression of our freedom, and the pie a trophy of our independence. But how apples came to be pie remained a mystery to me until a decade later, when I got a job baking seasonal fruit pies at a food shop in the Hamptons. For years afterward, I proudly brought fruit pies I’d baked to countless occasions, and taught just as many friends, neighbors and relatives how to make pies of their own.
My passion for pie runs deep. So it’s no light matter for me to tell you that for homey, baked apple desserts, I now skip the pie. Rustic, no-fail crisps, crumbles and cobblers are not just easier than apple pie, they’re better.
They are the apple dessert of America’s future. An apple crisp is defined by rolled oats in its rustic, crunchy topping. A cobbler is covered with dough, usually biscuit, sometimes cookie dough.
And a crumble is topped with buttery streusel. None of them requires you to roll out pie dough. Crisps, cobblers and crumbles can be assembled in any baking dish you have around, even a cast-iron skillet; throw it in the oven and leave it there for an hour without babysitting.
The toppings, easily made days in advance, also tolerate .
