My family has spent many summer vacations on Cape Cod, in a cottage on a pond near some now-defunct cranberry bogs. Those bogs, long since non-working, became conservation land a few years ago and have been reverting to their original marshy state as sluice gates rust through and the water flows back in; they're full of frogs and cattails and slime, and all those good things. But in those golden years when the bogs were sitting uncultivated but still mostly drained, they proved to be the perfect place for blackberry brambles to thrive. We would head to the bogs with a bunch of tupperware and come back loaded with enough berries for a pie or two (and probably poison ivy, as well, but the berries were worth it!) These days, there's only one little corner where the brambles haven't been flooded over, so we never get enough berries for a full pie, but we can manage a cobbler once a summer if we stretch the berries with sweet summer peaches. It's simple and sweet and deliciously summery; to me, this is the essence of August. <br /> <br />This cobbler is best, of course, with wild berries (if you're in a place where copious blueberries can be found, they'd be great here) but supermarket berries will always do in a pinch. That's the wonderful thing about baked fruit concoctions: the cooking brings out the best in mediocre fruit, and a multitude of sins can be covered up with good, fluffy biscuit topping. <br /> <br />The biscuit recipe was adapted from an old edition of the Joy of Cooking; the fruit mixture was all trial and error over many years of blackberrying adventures.

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