Home › Puddings and Sauces › Blackberry Mush
Blackberry Mush
To two quarts ripe berries add one and a half pints boiling water, and one pound sugar; cook a few moments, then stir in a pint of wheat flour, boil a few moments longer, put in greased mold to cool, and serve with cream or hard sauce. - Miss H. D. Martin, New York City.
A boiled fruit pudding thickened with plain flour and turned out of a mold — closer to a Scandinavian fruit grød than to anything called mush today. The one thing to fix is the cooking time.
- Cook the flour out"Boil a few moments longer" is not enough for a pint of wheat flour. Raw flour tastes pasty and chalky, and the starch needs sustained heat to gel properly; give it a full 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer, stirring constantly, until it no longer smells floury.
- Add the flour as a slurryStirring dry flour into boiling fruit guarantees lumps. Whisk it smooth with a cup or so of cold water first, then pour it into the pan in a thin stream while stirring.
- Measuring the flourBuckeye Cookery measures by volume: a pint of flour is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz. That is a lot of thickener, which is what lets the mush hold a molded shape — but the result is stiff, closer to sliceable than spoonable.
- Liquid and sugarA pint and a half of boiling water is 3 cups; a pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups. That is very sweet by current taste, and the berries bring their own sugar. Two-thirds of the amount still sets and molds the same way.
- Two quarts of berriesAbout 2 1/2 to 3 lb of blackberries, fresh or frozen. Frozen work well here since the fruit collapses anyway; do not thaw them first or you will lose juice.
- The moldGrease a roomy mold, loaf pan or bowl (the cooked mixture makes well over two quarts) and press the hot mush in firmly to avoid air pockets. Chill at least 4 hours, and preferably overnight, before unmolding — a warm mush will slump.
- Hard sauceThe period hard sauce is creamed butter and powdered sugar, flavored with brandy or vanilla, chilled firm. Cold cream is the plainer and better foil for something this sweet.
- YieldServes 8 to 10 as a molded pudding, cut in slices or wedges.
"Mush" in nineteenth-century American usage meant any thick boiled porridge — usually cornmeal, as in the fried cornmeal mush that appears elsewhere in books of this period — and the word was extended to fruit puddings thickened the same way, in a pot on the stove rather than baked or steamed. Dishes of this type have close relatives in the northern European kitchen, the Danish rødgrød and the north German rote Grütze, both fruit boiled with a grain or starch and turned out cold, and German-speaking settlement across Ohio and Pennsylvania makes that lineage plausible, though the connection is generally inferred rather than documented. What is certain is the economy of it: blackberries were gathered wild by the pailful in late summer, and a pint of flour turned two quarts of free fruit into a company dessert for ten. Buckeye Cookery (which first appeared in 1876 as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, published in Marysville, Ohio, the title Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping belonging to the 1877 revision) was assembled from contributions by named housewives, which is why this one carries Miss Martin's name and city.