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Blackberry Pie
Line sides only of pan or dish and make like huckleberry pie. Huckleberries or pieplant may be used in equal proportion with the blackberries.
This is a cross-reference entry rather than a full formula: it assumes you already have the huckleberry pie recipe in front of you, and it tells you only what changes. Two things in it need translating.
- "Line sides only"Pastry goes up the sides of the dish with no bottom crust, so the filling sits directly on the dish. Whether the pie is covered follows the huckleberry pie recipe, which is not reprinted here; the book gives no reason for leaving the base bare.
- Pieplant is rhubarbThe name comes from its main nineteenth-century use. Use the stalks only, trimmed and cut in half-inch pieces; discard the leaves, which contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. Equal proportion means half rhubarb, half blackberries by volume.
- Sugar and thickener are not givenPresumably the parent huckleberry recipe supplies them, though it is not reprinted here, so the amounts are open. For a 9-inch deep dish figure on 4-5 cups fruit; blackberries alone want less sugar than a rhubarb blend, which needs noticeably more. Two to three tablespoons of flour or a tablespoon and a half of cornstarch tossed with the fruit will keep the juice from flooding.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or time. As a modern reconstruction: start hot, 425F, for about 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then drop to 350F for another 30-35 minutes until the juice bubbles thickly. Thin, fast-running juice means the starch has not yet cooked out.
- Vent the topIf the huckleberry method calls for a top crust, cut generous slits so the steam can escape, or the crust may dome away from the filling and the fruit boil over at the rim.
- Rest itBlackberry filling is soupy straight from the oven and sets as it cools. Give it at least two hours. Serves six to eight.
- BerriesFrozen blackberries work; do not thaw them first, add an extra tablespoon of thickener, and expect about 10 minutes more baking. Cultivated berries are usually sweeter and milder than the wild fruit this book assumed.
Blackberry pie belongs to the household economy this book was written for: the fruit was gathered rather than bought, in quantity, in late summer, and it had to be used at once or preserved. That is why the entry is so short — a nineteenth-century cookbook treated berry pies as one recipe with interchangeable filling, and printed the method once under huckleberry, then noted the substitutions. The suggestion to stretch blackberries with rhubarb may have been practical rather than culinary: pieplant came up early and reliably in the kitchen garden, and its sharpness suited fruit that could be flat or overripe by the time enough had been picked, though the recipe itself gives no reason for the substitution. Rhubarb was paired with whatever berry was in hand, and the older books show the habit applied far more widely than the familiar strawberry-rhubarb combination.