Apple Pie : Janie Lee’s Cobblers Keep Her Rolling in Dough : Pastry: Fans of her juicy, rich fruit fillings and flaky crusts, with slightly burnt edges, flock to Pacific World of Cobblers.

Nannie was a sturdy woman of Indian descent who spent sweltering summer afternoons over a hot oven baking cobblers for her family. I can recall her light-brown, dough-covered hands as they reached down to give me, her granddaughter, a piece of leftover pastry dough she had rolled into “strips” sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon and baked as a treat to keep me out of the kitchen until the dessert was ready.

It was no ordinary cobbler. There was no biscuit dough topping, no dessert sauce. It was more like a deep-dish pie. Boasting a near-perfect, flaky top and bottom crust that enveloped a usually sweet but sometimes tart filling of apples or peaches, the cobbler was doused with butter. By today’s health-conscious standards this filling might be considered overly sweet, unnecessarily high in fat. But it was typical of the desserts of the South where she was born--a region where confections such as pralines and pecan pie tip the scales and set teeth on edge.

I rediscovered that solace recently when I stumbled upon Janie Lee Bradford, a hair-netted mother of three who specializes in cobblers. Until that time, apple pie to me was just dull. Sometimes a dry crust overwhelmed a soggy, mushy filling. Other times the dough was partially cooked and gummy. I had never really found the kind of juicy, rich cobbler with slightly burnt edges I remembered from childhood. That was before Bradford.

She greets customers in her Pacific World of Cobblers shop with Nannie’s invitingly warm smile. Surprisingly, she always has fresh dough on her hands. The kitchen in her Leimert Park bakery is also familiar; like Nannie’s, it’s uncomfortably hot. And like my grandmother, she always has a treat handy.

When she opened two years ago, she gave away free ice cream and cobbler. Later, when a transient happened upon her doorstep she gave him $5 and some cobbler. He returned a week later to thank her for her kindness and to tell her he was now looking for a job. “I have fed people as long as I can remember,” Bradford says, “I used to give kids my lunch and I’d be happy all day long.”

In addition to the monetary success of a thriving cobbler business, Bradford has received lots of gifts from customers who appreciate her benevolence. One man offered to paint her shop for free; another printed her business cards. “People say I’m so warm,” she says. “They say it is the Christ in me.”

Bradford’s cobbler shop supplies barbecue joints and health food restaurants. She even bakes them with an extra-high edge for one eatery, which sells the scraps for $1 each. She makes frozen cobblers for customers to bake during the holidays when the sweet shop is closed. She takes orders for fruit cobblers of all sorts, from blackberry to mixed peach and apple.

Although best known for fruit cobblers, Bradford’s menu board also touts sweet potato pie. It comes from a recipe she developed when she was 12 years old. “In those days,” Bradford explains, “you learned how to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was part of the family structure. Everybody was cooking for their family.”

That early experience developed her lifelong love of cooking. Eventually she became dissatisfied with her career as a parole officer and purchased a restaurant. Within two years her clientele included black musicians, actors and other notables. “(Singer) Gladys Knight wanted me to be her (personal) cook but I like working for myself,” Bradford says. Her restaurant flourished for 15 years until she discovered that selling cobblers as a side venture was equally profitable. The restaurant was sold, she said, because “the cobblers were my best asset and (the shop has) been better than a restaurant ever would have been.”

What makes Bradford’s cobblers so special?

“My crust is better than anybody else’s,” she brags, “it melts in your mouth.” And there are some other obvious differences between her two-crust cobbler and traditional apple pie. Unlike many recipes in which raw apples and pastry are baked until the apples are tender, but still firm and the crust golden, Bradford’s formula calls for cooking the apple-sugar mixture before baking. This yields a smooth and flavorful filling, she says, and it prevents the top crust from scorching while the apples soften. She dices an entire stick of butter over the filling before placing on the top crust, although two or three tablespoons is customary. “I’ve never had anyone bring back a pie,” Bradford says.

And no complaints, she says, except one: “That there wasn’t enough.”

JANIE BRADFORD’S APPLE COBBLER

3 cups flour plus 3 tablespoons flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups shortening

1/2 cup ice water

4 to 5 cups peeled and sliced Granny Smith apples

2 cups sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1 cup water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1/2 cup butter

Combine 3 cups flour and salt in bowl. Cut in shortening until mixture resembles peas. Add ice water few tablespoons at time until dough comes together and pulls away from sides of bowl. Divide dough in half and roll out one half to fit 9-inch square baking pan. Set aside.

Combine apples, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, water and lemon juice in saucepan. Bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer until apples are tender, about 5 minutes. Combine remaining 3 tablespoons flour and 3 tablespoons water to form paste. Stir into apple mixture, then pour filling into pan. Slice butter over top of filling.

Roll out remaining dough and place on top of filling. Crimp to seal edges and make few slits in top crust to allow steam to escape and keep cobbler from boiling over. Bake at 350 degrees 1 hour. Makes 6 to 8 servings.