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Whortleberry Pie
Pour just enough boiling water on the fruit to prevent it from sticking to the bottom of the preserving kettle. Boil a minute, sweeten and pour into a pie-plate lined with paste. Dredge with flour, cover with paste and bake.--Mrs. S. T.
A bare-bones fruit pie of the kind written for cooks who already knew how pastry behaved. The quantities are entirely left to you, so the notes below fill in what Mrs. S. T. assumed.
- What a whortleberry isAn older English name covering huckleberries and bilberries, and used loosely in American books for wild blueberries. Cultivated blueberries work directly; they are juicier and slightly less tart than true huckleberries, so taste before sweetening.
- QuantitiesA 9-inch double-crust pie takes about 4 cups (roughly 1 1/2 lb) of berries. "Sweeten" means to taste; 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar per quart of fruit is a workable range for a berry pie, though period recipes vary widely.
- The boiling waterOnly a few tablespoons, enough to release juice before the fruit scorches. Too much and the filling floods the crust. Huckleberries and blueberries both give up liquid readily once heated, so start with two or three tablespoons.
- Boil a minute, no moreThis is the hinge. The berries are meant to be barely broken, not stewed to jam; they finish cooking in the oven. A long boil collapses the fruit and leaves a thin, dull filling.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy pan that lets steam escape quickly. Use stainless or enameled cast iron rather than bare copper or aluminum, since berries are acid enough to pick up a metallic taste.
- "Dredge with flour"The thickener, scattered over the fruit in the shell rather than stirred in. Two tablespoons of flour for a 9-inch pie, or one tablespoon of cornstarch, which sets clearer.
- Cool the fruit firstNot stated, but hot filling poured onto raw pastry melts the fat and gives a soggy base. Let it come down to warm before filling and covering.
- OvenStart at 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the juice bubbles thickly through the vents. Cut steam vents in the top crust and bake on a sheet pan; berry pies boil over.
- ServingEight slices. Berry pies need at least two hours to cool and set, or the filling runs.
Whortleberry is a British name, carried to America and applied loosely to whatever small dark berry grew wild in the neighborhood; its origin is uncertain, and the derivation sometimes offered from an Old English form is speculative rather than established. In Virginia that generally meant huckleberries, gathered rather than grown. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, and this terse note initialed "Mrs. S. T." is typical of the book's method — a shorthand memorandum passed between cooks who needed no instruction on making paste or judging an oven, only a reminder of how to handle the fruit. The dredging of flour over the berries in the shell, instead of a pre-thickened filling, is the older technique, common in American pie recipes before cornstarch became a pantry staple.