Home › A Cluster of Berries › Whortleberry or Huckleberry Pie
Whortleberry or Huckleberry Pie
Line the sides of baking dish or pan with paste and fill centre with the berries, sprinkling with sugar, adding a lump of butter and a tablespoon each of flour and water. Flavour with lemon or cranberry juice. Cover with crust or lattice strips and bake.
A nineteenth-century berry pie stripped to its bones: the writer assumes you know how much fruit fills your dish and how long a pie takes. Here is what to supply.
- Paste means pastry"Paste" is the period word for pie dough, in this case a plain short crust. "Line the sides" is loose phrasing; line the bottom and sides of a 9-inch plate, since a bottomless berry pie will flood.
- Quantities to assumeA 9-inch plate takes about 4 cups of berries, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter. The tablespoon of flour called for is thin for that volume of juice; 3 to 4 tablespoons, or 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, gives a filling that will hold a cut edge.
- The tablespoon of waterPresumably a hedge against firm, underripe fruit; wild berries vary a good deal. Cultivated blueberries or frozen fruit release plenty of liquid on their own and need no added water.
- OvenThe original gives none. Start at 425F for 15 to 20 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 40 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the lattice rather than running thin.
- Whortleberry and huckleberryBoth names covered several wild species in American usage, including true huckleberries (Gaylussacia, with ten hard little seeds) and lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium). Blueberries are the practical substitute; the pie will be sweeter and softer.
- The acidLemon or cranberry juice is not decoration; a tablespoon of lemon juice sharpens baked berry fruit that can otherwise taste flat.
- CoolingBerry pies thicken as they cool. Give it at least two hours before cutting or the filling will run off the plate.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Whortleberry is the older English name, carried to America and applied loosely to whatever small dark wild berry grew in the neighbourhood; huckleberry appears to be an English dialect corruption of it, and by the nineteenth century the two were often used interchangeably. Huckleberries resisted cultivation, so a pie like this depended on foraging in July and August. Recipe collections of the period give the fruit no measurement at all. You baked what you had gathered. The blueberry only overtook it commercially after breeders began developing highbush varieties in the early twentieth century, and modern supermarket pies made under this name are almost always blueberry.