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Old-Fashioned Whortleberry Pudding
Rub a pint of flour in with a quart of whortleberries and a little salt, wetting the whole with a very little waterabout a half-cup. Tie snug in a pudding cloth with no room for swelling and boil two hours. Serve with a sweet or wine sauce.
HUCKLEBERRY CAKE No. I Cream one cup of sugar with a half-cup of butter; add one cup of milk, two of flour, and two teaspoons baking powder. Place a pint of huckleberries in a dish and rub sugar through them well, then stir into the cake and bake in shallow pans.
HUCKLEBERRY CAKE No. 2 Sift through a quart of flour a scant teaspoon of salt and two (heaping) of baking powder. Rub into this a tablespoon of shortening, two eggs, a cup of milk, and quart of berries well sugared, and bake quickly in a shallow pan. Serve with butter or cream, cutting the cake open.
Three recipes on one page, all built around the same wild berry. The boiled pudding is the odd one out and needs the most translation; the two cakes are close to modern quick breads.
- Whortleberry, huckleberry, blueberryWhortleberry is the older English name for the bilberry, carried over in America to true huckleberries and, loosely, to blueberries. Cultivated blueberries work throughout, though they are sweeter and juicier than the wild fruit these recipes assume.
- The unitsA pint of flour is about 2 cups, roughly 8-9 oz; a quart of flour about 4 cups. A quart of berries is 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, a pint about 12 oz. "A little salt" in the pudding is around 1/2 teaspoon.
- Tie snug, and mean itThis is the hinge of the pudding. There is no leavening and no egg, so the dough must not expand; slack cloth lets water in and the pudding turns to paste. Scald the cloth, flour the inside heavily, and tie close against the mass.
- Boiling the cloth puddingThe water must stay at a full rolling boil for the whole two hours and the pudding must stay covered, so keep a kettle of boiling water at hand to top up. Adding cold water stops the cooking and the pudding goes heavy.
- What comes outExpect something dense and closer to a berry dumpling than a cake -- half a cup of water to a pint of flour makes a stiff dough. The sauce is not optional; a hard sauce, a lemon or vanilla sweet sauce, or a wine sauce carries the whole dish, since there is no sugar in the pudding at all.
- Oven heat for the cakesThe original states no oven heat. No. 1 is a creamed butter cake and suits a moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F in shallow pans. "Bake quickly" for No. 2 points to a hot oven, roughly 425-450F -- it is a biscuit-type batter and wants fast heat. Times will depend on the pan and are not given in the recipe.
- Sugaring the berries"Rub sugar through them" means tossing the fruit with sugar until coated. A quarter cup for a pint of fruit is about right; the original leaves the amount to the cook.
- No. 2 is a shortcake, not a cakeThere is no sugar in the batter, only on the berries, and a single tablespoon of shortening to a quart of flour. That is why the instruction is to split it and serve with butter or cream. Bake it in a shallow pan and treat it as bread.
Boiled puddings tied in a floured cloth were the everyday sweet of English and American kitchens for the better part of three centuries, because they needed only a pot of water and a hearth fire -- no oven, and no oven fuel. That this one contains flour, fruit, salt and water and nothing else marks it as a plain country pudding, with the sugar deferred to the sauce, where a little went further. The berries themselves were gathered rather than bought: the highbush blueberry was not brought into commercial cultivation until the second decade of the twentieth century, work generally credited to Frederick Coville and Elizabeth White in New Jersey, so a cookbook of this vintage assumes a household that picks its own.