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Blueberry Bread or Muffins
Make as above or for Blackberry Muffins, in muffin rings or one shallow sheet.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the blackberry muffin batter and tells you only what shape to bake it in. A few notes on what that instruction assumed.
- You need the base recipeNothing here is measurable on its own. Use the blackberry muffin batter from the same section, or any plain muffin batter of roughly two cups flour, and substitute blueberries by volume for the blackberries.
- Muffin ringsThese were plain metal bands, commonly around three inches across and roughly an inch deep, set on a greased griddle or baking sheet so the batter spread to fill them. A standard 12-cup muffin tin gives a similar result with less fuss; ring molds or crumpet rings on a sheet pan reproduce the original shape.
- "One shallow sheet"Presumably the bread version of the title: the same batter poured shallowly into a greased pan, baked, and cut into squares. A 9-inch square pan is a reasonable modern stand-in. It will need longer than muffins, perhaps 30 to 35 minutes.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. A hot oven, around 400 to 425F, suits a muffin batter of this kind, with muffins taking roughly 18 to 22 minutes; the sheet, being deeper, is better around 375F.
- Handling the berriesFold the blueberries in at the very end and stop mixing the moment they are distributed. Overworked muffin batter turns tough and the berries bleed grey-green streaks through the crumb.
- Fresh versus frozenFrozen berries work but should go in still frozen and unwashed, tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour, or they will sink and weep. Wild or lowbush berries, which may well be what was to hand, are smaller and sharper-flavoured than cultivated highbush fruit; with supermarket berries you may want a little lemon zest.
- YieldA standard two-cup-flour muffin batter gives about 12 muffins or one 9-inch square of bread, cut into nine or twelve pieces. Best eaten the day they are made.
Muffin rings are the tell here: before the pressed-tin gem pan became universal in American kitchens, muffins were baked in loose metal hoops on a griddle or sheet, and many nineteenth-century books treat "muffins" and "a shallow sheet of bread" as the same batter in two shapes. The berries themselves point to a domestic gathering economy rather than a market one. Blueberries and huckleberries were picked wild well into the twentieth century, and cookbook writers often used the names interchangeably despite their being different genera, with "huckleberry" also applied to western Vaccinium. Commercial highbush blueberry cultivation only began in earnest in the 1910s, with the first commercial crop in 1916, so recipes of this kind are largely describing fruit that arrived in the kitchen by the pailful in season and had to be used quickly, which may explain the terse, interchangeable treatment: one berry batter, adapted to whatever the pail held.