Consider the cunning glory of fruit. Juicy and sweet, bursting with nuanced flavor, stunningly beautiful — designed by nature to be so irresistible that hungry predators are seduced into eating it up and scattering the seeds far and wide. A triumph of evolutionary ingenuity and a blessing to us all. To add to its allure, fruit is not a lot of work to eat. It is almost always most delicious eaten fresh, ripe, raw — straight from the vine, the tree or the bush.

That doesn't stop us from trying to improve on nature, however, and there are a multitude of recipes out there for cooked fruit. With the advent of October, we are moving into the season where I think that makes perfect sense.

Not that I have anything against cooked desserts made from summer fruit, and in fact I am quite partial to a deep-dish cherry pie, a blueberry buckle or a peach cobbler. But generally speaking, I prefer my summer fruit uncooked. I think perfect, delicate peaches should be eaten out of hand with juices dripping down the chin, fragile jewel-colored berries are best spilling from just-baked shortcake and ripe, fragrant melons — well, no one really cooks melons anyway, and rightly so!

But when the long slow days of fresh berries and peaches have waned, the crisper fruits of autumn — late plums, tart apples, juicy pears — almost beg to be simmered with brown sugar and spices and balanced with the sweet flaky crunch of pastry.

There are lots of ways to make this happen. One of the most gorgeous versions I've seen recently was an apple pie made last Thanksgiving by my step-daughter's mother-in-law, with a top crust made entirely of overlapping leaf-shaped pastry cutouts, glittering with cinnamon sugar. It was truly lovely to look at and delicious to eat, but it took painstaking effort. If you are in a tearing hurry, or only lazy like me, it's good to know that you can get the same taste effect with alternatives that are as easy as, no, easier than pie.

I'm thinking of the good old-fashioned home style fruit desserts — the cobblers, crisps, betties and buckles — that are so wonderful scooped warm into a bowl, with sweet fruit juices soaking into rich pastry and vanilla ice cream melting over the top. They aren't fancy, and they certainly aren't difficult, but they can be as spectacularly tasty as any dessert I know.

When I was thinking of writing about these desserts for an early fall food column, I was brought up short by the fact that I actually don't have any idea of what they are. Since half the fun of writing this column is that it gives me the chance to stop what I should be doing and look into obscure food questions, I got right on it.

The short answer to what these desserts are all about is that they are laid back, relaxed versions of the pie — pies on the weekend, with their feet up. No rolled out crust, no crimped edges, no lattices or pastry leaf cut-outs. Cobblers and their kin begin with fruit cooked in syrup, and are simply topped by some form of doughy flour, butter, sugar mixture.

That's the short answer, but it is not entirely complete. Even a quick Google search assured me that this subject is more complicated than I thought. Sometimes the dough goes on top of the fruit (in cut-out biscuit form, or just dolloped out of the spoon, or spread over all), sometimes the dough is cooked in the fruit syrup like dumplings, sometimes there is dough on both the top and the bottom. Sometimes the dough is more like dough, sometimes like crumbs, sometimes it is more like cake or pancake batter.

Here's a brief glossary of fruit desserts.

Cobblers

Cobblers are deep-dish desserts that are most often just thickened, cooked fruit with a biscuit topping. They can, however, have a top and bottom crust and resemble a pie, or they can have both a midlevel crust that cooks in the juices and a more crunchy top crust. Cobblers can be made with any fruit that is good cooked — berries, peaches, plums in summer, any fall fruit. I have read about sweet potato cobblers, but in general you want a juicy base for this dessert. It may be called a cobbler because it is "cobbled together" out of ingredients in the pantry, or because it looks like a cobbled road. No matter, it still tastes great.

Crisps

Crisps have fruit on the bottom and a crumb mixture (usually flour, sugar, butter and oats) on top. The topping can also have nuts, or cookie, bread or cereal crumbs added. They are called crisps for obvious reasons. The British, who use "crisps" for potato chips, call them "crumbles," also for obvious reasons.

Brown betties

Betties have cooked fruit (usually apples) between two layers of buttered bread crumbs. The recipe included here is a variation on this, with a short bread crust and a crumb topping.

Buckles

Fruit (usually berries) is added to a cake-like batter and baked with a streusel crumb topping. They are vaguely related to the French clafouti, a sort of deep-dish pancake with cherries.

Slumps and grunts

These are cobblers cooked covered on top of the stove, steaming the biscuit topping. If you believe the food lore, grunts "grunt" as steam escapes under the biscuit, and slumps "slump" on the plate.

Pandowdies

Molasses-sweetened fruit is topped with a biscuit pastry that is broken up and pushed into the fruit as it bakes so it can sop up the juices.

Keep in mind that regional variations and family tradition make this list only loosely accurate. If your mom always made a cobbler with a bottom crust, well then cobblers have bottom crusts. End of discussion as far as I am concerned — in matters like these, mom is always right.

Christine would love to hear from you about food or a favorite dining experience. Reach her by e-mail at cbarbour@heraldt.com. Food Fare partner Jennifer Piurek will be exploring xxxxx next week.