cobbler

recently, i was having an argument with a friend about where we got the name for cobbler desserts. i maintain that it could be possible that somebody who made a cobbler thought it looked like a cobblestone street (bumpy and all) and named it a cobbler. my friend believes that the person who invented cobbler was named cobbler. or maybe it has something to do with shoes. if anybody knows, help!

Total WAG here. One definition of “cobble” is “to throw together hastily,” so my guess is that when there wasn’t enough time to produce a pie or some more elaborate dessert, a cook could still “cobble together” a tasty confection of fruit and pastry - perhaps when the boss was unexpectedly brought home for dinner.

Actually, it was those same bumpy streets being used by bakery wagons to deliver more well-formed confections which were tossed together enroute and mixed up, resulting in “a load of old cobblers” …

I don’t know about the American dessert, but “cobblers”, as in “a load of old …” is rhyming slang: cobbler’s awls = balls.

And then there’s the story of the lady policeman describing how she caught the burglar:

“I chased him past the grocer’s, and the butcher’s and the baker’s - and I finally caught him by the cobblers!”