The distinctions between the terms for baked desserts using fruit and pastry of some sort are fine, with a lot of overlap. For the punctilious, I offer the following glossary:

• Pie: Made with a bottom crust, usually pastry, and usually a top crust as well, but that can be a full sheet, a lattice crust or a streusel topping of flour, butter, sugar, oatmeal and/or nuts. Except, savory pot pies usually just have a top pastry crust.

• Tart: Usually just one bottom pastry crust, topped with fruit or cream filling.

• Cobbler: Usually just a top crust of some sort of dough. A pie crust can be used, or biscuits; it can be a full sheet or latticed, or biscuit dough dropped in clumps. Cobblers are usually thought of as a deep-dish preparation.

• Crisp: Can be considered cobblers with a streusel topping of some sort. Also called in some quarters a crumble.

• Pandowdy: A wonderful American folk name for a type of cobbler with a rustic biscuit-dough crust, one homely or "dowdy" in appearance. Or, the name may come from the practice of cutting through the baked crust in several places, and pushing the crust down into the filling before serving, a practice called “dowdying.”

• Betty: A rustic American fruit pudding, made by layering sliced fruit with bread crumbs, brown sugar, molasses or maple syrup, and baking until bubbly. Usually made with apples: Apple brown betty.

• Slump: “Food Lover’s Companion” calls this “an old-fashioned New England dessert of fruit, usually berries, topped with biscuit dough and stewed until the biscuit topping is cooked through. Also called a grunt.”

But one of my favorite summer desserts using peaches or blackberries is made with melted butter, on which one drops a simple milky batter, and tops with fruit. When baked, the batter rises up and covers the fruit, and then certainly slumps down and collapses in the middle as it cools, making a chewy, fruit-filled pudding. Some call this a “creeping cobbler,” but it meets my own criteria for a slump.