Home › Pies of All Kinds › New England Blueberry Pie
New England Blueberry Pie
Wash and dredge blueberries with Five Roses flour; then scatter among them ½ cup sugar for each pint of berries. Fill paste shells with this, dot with butter, cover with another crust and bake.
These are richer than huckleberry or blueberry pies when made in the usual way, the flour thickening the juice slightly and the butter tempering the acid.
A promotional recipe from a flour company, written for cooks who already knew how to build a two-crust pie. The proportions are sound; what is missing is the oven and the numbers.
- The dredging is the whole methodThe flour clinging to the wet berries is the only thickener. Wash the fruit and do not dry it, then toss with 2 to 3 tablespoons flour per quart of berries so each one carries a film. Dry berries shed the flour and the pie runs.
- "A pint of berries"A dry pint of blueberries is about 12 oz, or roughly 2 cups. A standard 9-inch pie takes 4 to 5 cups, so figure 1 to 1¼ cups sugar by the recipe's ratio. That is on the sweet side by current taste; many cooks now use ½ to ¾ cup total for a 9-inch pie.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A fruit pie of this kind is started hot to set the bottom crust, 425F for about 15 minutes, then dropped to 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- "Paste" and "paste shells"Paste is pastry. A shell here is the lined pie plate, not a blind-baked case; the bottom crust goes in raw and bakes with the filling.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, and the reason this book exists. Any all-purpose flour works for the dredging; for the crust, a lower-protein pastry flour gives a more tender result than the hard wheat the book was selling.
- The butterUnspecified, as usual. One to two tablespoons in small dots across the fruit is the standard reading. It enriches the juice rather than tempering acid in any chemical sense.
- Vent and coolCut steam vents in the top crust or the filling will lift it. Cool at least three hours before cutting; a flour-thickened berry filling sets only as it comes down to room temperature.
- YieldOne 9-inch double-crust pie, six to eight servings.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada, sold cheaply or given away with flour to put the brand in domestic kitchens. Its recipes were drawn largely from contributions by housewives who used the flour, and a number carry a regional label like this one. Botanically the two fruits do differ - true huckleberries have ten hard, gritty seeds, while blueberries have many tiny soft ones - but the names were often used interchangeably in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada, as this recipe's own pairing of "huckleberry or blueberry" suggests. Dredging fruit with flour rather than stirring in cornstarch was the older practice, and it gives a looser, more syrupy filling than the firm sliceable wedge a modern pie aims at.