Home › Village Receipts › Blueberry Bread
Blueberry Bread
One egg, one cup of milk, salt spoon of salt, half cup of sugar, two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder, one tablespoon of butter.or shortening, one pint of blueberries. Bake in flat tin for half an hour. This recipe can be used for muffins by omitting the berries.
— Mrs. E. S. Root
A plain quick bread written the way village cooks wrote them: ingredients in a line, method assumed. Everything you need to supply is below.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all. Bake at 375F; half an hour suits a flat tin at that heat, and a skewer should come out clean.
- "Flat tin"A shallow square or oblong pan, roughly an 8- or 9-inch square. In a deeper pan the centre will still be wet at thirty minutes.
- Salt spoonThe smallest spoon in a Victorian condiment set, about a quarter teaspoon.
- A pint of blueberriesMeasured by volume, about 2 cups or 10-12 oz. That is a heavy load of fruit for two cups of flour; toss the berries in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink and stall the crumb.
- Method, since none is givenMelt the tablespoon of butter and treat this as a muffin batter: whisk egg, milk, sugar and melted butter, then stir into the combined flour, baking powder and salt only until the dry disappears. Overworking gives tunnels and a tough top.
- One tablespoon of fatGenuinely lean by modern standards, closer to a soda bread than a bakery muffin. It stales quickly; eat it the day it is made or split and toast the leftovers.
- The muffin variationOmitting the berries as directed gives about a dozen small muffins. Bake those at the same heat for 18-20 minutes, not the full half hour.
- YieldOne 8-inch pan, cut into nine squares.
Recipes like this one belong to the era when chemical leavening had made cake-like breads an everyday possibility in an ordinary kitchen: baking powder was widely sold in tins by the second half of the nineteenth century, and a cook could put a sweet bread on the table in under an hour without yeast, sponge or waiting. The attribution to Mrs. E. S. Root is typical of the community cookbook form, where a name in small type was both a credit and a local guarantee.