Peach Crumb Pie

Ingredients

• 1 unbaked 9-inch pie crust (store-bought or homemade)
• 6 cups peeled, sliced peaches
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 3 tbsp cornstarch
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup cold butter, cubed
• 1/4 tsp salt

Method

1. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C). Fit the crust into a 9-inch pie dish and crimp the edges.
2. Toss the peeled, sliced peaches with the sugar, thickener, spice, and lemon juice, then spread evenly in the crust.
3. For the crumb topping, rub the flour, brown sugar, butter, and salt together with your fingers until it forms coarse, pea-sized clumps.
4. Scatter the crumb topping evenly over the filling.
5. Bake for 50–60 minutes, tenting the edges with foil if the crust browns too quickly, until the topping is golden and the filling bubbles at the edges.
6. Cool on a wire rack at least 2 hours before slicing.

The Tale of Peach Crumb Pie

Story updated September 15, 2026

Peach crumb pie combines two well-documented but separate traditions: Southern peach cultivation, which traces to 16th-century Spanish missionaries introducing the fruit to coastal Georgia and Florida, and the German streusel topping brought to Pennsylvania by German-speaking "Pennsylvania Dutch" immigrants starting in the 1600s and 1700s. While Dutch apple pie is the best-known crumb-topped pie, the same buttery mixture of flour, sugar, and butter was readily applied to other fruit fillings, including peach, especially once Southern peaches and Pennsylvania German baking traditions mixed in American kitchens and cookbooks over the 19th and 20th centuries. There's no single credited inventor of peach crumb pie specifically; it represents the broader, undocumented process by which a popular topping migrated from one fruit filling to another in home kitchens, church cookbooks, and bakeries, becoming especially common wherever peaches were plentiful, from Southern orchards to Midwestern farm stands, as an easier alternative to rolling out a full double crust.