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Blackberry Pie
Pick the berries, but do not wash them. Stew slightly, sweeten, pour into a pie plate, lined with paste. Grate in a little nutmeg, dredge with flour, put on a top crust and bake.
A terse nineteenth-century fruit pie that assumes the cook already knows how to line a plate with pastry and judge a fire. The gaps worth filling are the oven, the thickening and the sugar.
- Wash them anywayThe instruction not to wash is probably about keeping the berries from going watery and losing juice into the sink. Rinse them in a colander and drain well on a towel; berries bought or picked today may carry spray residue or grit, and the filling is cooked in any case.
- "Paste" is pastryPaste here means a plain short crust of the kind made with lard or butter. Enough for a double-crusted 9-inch pie is about 2 1/2 cups flour to 1 cup fat, with ice water to bind.
- "Stew slightly" means barelyTwo or three minutes over moderate heat, just until the juices run; the recipe sweetens after stewing, so stir the sugar in then and only until it dissolves. Longer and the berries collapse into jam and the pie has no texture.
- SweeteningNo quantity is given because berry sweetness varies wildly. For about 5 cups of blackberries, start at 3/4 cup sugar and taste the stewed fruit; wild or underripe berries may want a full cup.
- The flour dredge is the thickenerThis is the hinge. The berries go in hot and juicy, and the flour scattered over the surface is all that stands between you and a soaked bottom crust. Two to three tablespoons, and it works better tossed through the fruit than dusted on top. Cornstarch at half the amount does the same job more clearly.
- OvenBake at 425F for 20 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 30 to 35 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents. Cut steam slits in the top crust before it goes in.
- Rest before cuttingA berry pie cut hot runs. Give it at least two hours at room temperature so the starch sets.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by housewives of Virginia and her sister states, is full of recipes written in this shorthand: the reader is presumed to have made pastry a thousand times and needs only the particulars of the filling. Blackberries earned their place because they cost nothing. They grew in hedgerows, along fence lines and in cut-over fields across the South, and blackberry picking is often said to have been children's summer work, producing more fruit than a family could eat fresh hon hence the jams, cordials, vinegars and pies that crowd the fruit chapters of period cookbooks. The grated nutmeg is generally traced to an older English tradition of spicing baked fruit, and the wholly unmeasured sugar and flour reflect a kitchen where such things were judged by eye and tongue rather than by cup.