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To Dry Whortleberries
Dry as for strawberries. Before using soak over night. In cooking them add a little lemon or other tart fruit juice.
A fragment of a recipe that assumes you have already read the strawberry entry a few pages earlier: spread the fruit in a single layer and dry it slowly until leathery. The whole method fits in one line, so most of the work is in filling the gaps.
- What a whortleberry isAn old English name covering the bilberry and, in American books of this period, the wild huckleberry and lowbush blueberry more or less interchangeably. Cultivated blueberries are larger and will take longer to dry.
- Prick or blanch the skinsPricking or blanching the skins is not in the original, but a whole waxy berry gives up its moisture slowly; a dip of 15 to 30 seconds in boiling water followed by cold water checks the skin and speeds drying appreciably.
- Temperature the book cannot give youThe original gives no temperature; drying of this kind was done by sun, a warm room, or residual stove heat. In a dehydrator or oven, 135F/57C is the usual modern working figure. Too high a heat sets the surface before the inside has dried, and the fruit never dries through.
- How to know they are doneDried berries should rattle slightly and feel like dried currants, with no bead of juice when you crush one. Expect 10 to 18 hours depending on size and skin. Cool fully, then hold them in a jar for a week and shake daily; any condensation means they go back to dry further.
- YieldNot stated in the original. Reckon on roughly 4 to 5 pounds of fresh berries for 1 pound dried, or about a cup dried from a quart fresh.
- The overnight soakCover with cold water by an inch. Use the soaking liquid in the pie or pudding rather than pouring it off, since colour and flavour leach into it.
- Why the lemon juiceDrying concentrates sugar and drives off some of the volatile aromatics that make a fresh berry taste bright. Acid puts the edge back and helps hold the colour in cooking. The original says only 'a little' -- add lemon juice to taste.
- StorageAirtight, dark, and cool. Properly dried berries keep a year at room temperature; the freezer buys longer and also kills any insect eggs that came in with wild-picked fruit.
Drying was the default way to keep small fruit before home canning became cheap and routine, and whortleberries took to it better than most because they are naturally acidic and well skinned. The name is the older English one, generally taken to be a form of the dialect "hurtleberry"; huckleberry is usually said to be an alteration of the same word, applied in America to a different genus. Wild bilberries and huckleberries resisted cultivation, so a household's whole year's supply arrived in a few weeks of high summer and had to be dealt with at once, which explains the terseness here: this is not a dish but a storage instruction, filed with the other berries and cross-referenced to save space in a book already crowded with them. The instruction to add tart juice in cooking is a quiet admission that dried fruit is not the same as fresh, and that cooks of the period knew it.