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Huckleberry Cake
1 pint of berries, 1 cupful of sugar. Rub into the sugar 2 rounding tablespoonfuls of soft butter, 1 cupful of milk, 2 cupfuls of flour, with 2 heaping teaspoonfuls of baking-powder sifted into the flour, a very little salt, and nutmeg. Add another cupful of flour to the berries and stir in last. Serve warm as dessert or tea cake, with sugar and butter.
A plain butter cake carrying a full pint of berries, leavened with baking powder and no eggs. The batter is stiff by modern standards, which is what keeps the fruit suspended.
- Total flourThree cupfuls in all: two sifted with the baking powder into the batter, one tossed with the berries. Do not skip the second cup, since the floured fruit is what stops the berries sinking and bleeding.
- Rounding and heapingA rounding tablespoon of butter is about 1 oz, so roughly 2 oz (half a stick) softened. Two heaping teaspoons of baking powder is closer to 3 level teaspoons, appropriate for three cups of flour.
- NutmegNo quantity is given. A quarter teaspoon, freshly grated, is in keeping with the period; more will overwhelm the huckleberries.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. As a modern starting point only, try around 350F in a greased 8-inch square or a 9x5 loaf pan, checking from about 35 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.
- The berriesTrue huckleberries have larger, crunchier seeds than blueberries and a more resinous flavour. Cultivated blueberries substitute one for one; if using frozen, keep them frozen while tossing with flour and add a few minutes to the bake.
- No eggsThe crumb will be short and slightly crumbly rather than springy, which is correct for this style. It is best the day it is made and stales quickly.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten squares. Served warm as directed, with sugar and butter at the table, it sits between a cake and a shortcake.
Huckleberries were a gathered fruit rather than a bought one through most of the nineteenth century in America, picked wild from scrubby hillsides in summer and used quickly, which is why so many books of the period give them their own cake, pudding and pie. The name is generally traced to an English dialect corruption of "hurtleberry," a word for the whortleberry or bilberry, transferred by settlers to the unfamiliar American fruit; the same loose naming means "huckleberry" in old recipes often meant what a botanist would call a blueberry. Recipes of this kind are typically recorded in their simplest form: butter rubbed into sugar rather than beaten with eggs, chemical leavening, and the fruit floured and stirred in last, a technique that appears in print repeatedly once baking powder became widely available from the 1860s.