Shopper Kitchen: Try a Pie Filling Cobbler for Valentine’s Day
By ANGELA McRAE, The Shopper Kitchen
Did you know that the Campbell’s Soup folks used to make pie fillings? While researching the history of canned pie fillings, I was surprised to learn that in the late 1800s, those Campbell’s folks were known as the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company. In their early days, they made a fruit pie filling as well as mincemeat, according to the company’s website.
One company I have long associated with pie fillings, however, is Libby’s. Some years ago, I was watching a sitcom with a fun storyline. It was Thanksgiving, and the husband on the show had always bemoaned the fact that his wife could never make a pumpkin pie that tasted quite like his mother’s. The wife was telling her best friend that she’d given up on trying to bake the pumpkin pie of her husband’s dreams, and she confessed that on that Thanksgiving, she’d just plopped some canned pumpkin pie filling into a pie shell and called it done. Naturally, the husband ate a piece of it and said something like, “Honey, you did it! It tastes just like Mom’s.” (The brand was Libby’s in my memory, but I suppose I’d have to find that old TV show to verify this.)
And as with Campbell’s, the Libby’s history surprised me. Libby, McNeill, and Libby began in 1869, and they canned meat! The company’s website says, “The business began with a canned meat product, beef in brine, or corned beef. It became well-known when it began to package the meat in a trapezoid-shaped can starting in 1875.”
Today, of course, we have lots of brands of pie filling. I had a can of raspberry pie filling left over from the holidays and decided to look online for cobbler recipes. I like pies, but they can be fussy to make, while a cobbler is easy to whip up since the batter and the filling cook together.
I changed up the recipe and reduced the sugar, as most pie fillings are sugary enough. The resulting cobbler was rich and sweet, and I can’t help thinking any berry-flavored version of this would be good, especially for Valentine’s Day but anytime you want a nice warm dessert. Others have made similar cobblers with strawberry-rhubarb and cherry pie fillings. Now I want to try them all!
Pie Filling Cobbler
1/2 cup butter, melted
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 cup milk
1 (15-ounce) can pie filling (any flavor)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Melt butter in a 9 x 9-inch baking dish (I used a heart-shaped baking dish of a similar size). In a small bowl, mix sugar, flour, salt, and baking powder. Add milk to the dry ingredients and blend well. Pour batter over melted butter in pan. Add pie filling over the batter, dropping it by spoonfuls and evenly spacing it over the batter. Bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour or until golden brown.
