While fresh fruit, like a crisp apple or a juicy peach, should suffice for dessert, it so often doesn’t. Enter thrifty, humble, but oh-so-satisfying American fruit desserts like dumplings, fritters, cobblers, and crisps. But what is American fruit? Blueberries and cranberries, sure. But apples and peaches are not as quintessentially American as you might think. Apples got their start in America from seeds brought by English colonists (the first apple orchard was planted on a slope in Boston in what is now Beacon Hill), while peaches got their foothold in Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia, courtesy of the Spanish explorers who arrived there in the late 16th century.

Of the myriad of apple desserts seen now, classic apple dumplings and apple fritters are two of our favorites. In the 19th century, every homemaker could toss together a biscuit or pie dough and deftly wrap it around stuffed apples. They tied up the dumplings in cheesecloth, boiled or steamed them, and served them with sauce; latter-day cooks prefer to bake them. We’re not sure when apple dumplings fell out of favor, but we set out to resurrect them. The same goes for apple fritters. Today, these apple-studded pastries seem to be elbowing out muffins and scones at coffee shops, but we were sure we could do better. We wanted a fritter packed with warm-spiced apple flavor—crisp on the outside and moist, not greasy, within.

Among the simplest fruit desserts out there are cobblers, crisps, and the funny-named grunts. But soggy toppings, too-thick (or too-thin) fillings, and unbalanced fruit flavor were a few of the challenges we’d tackle in creating our versions. In this chapter, we’ll show you how to make fruit desserts the best they can be.