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Blueberry Puffs
Use rule for Snow Puffs and serve surrounded by a sauce made by cooking two cups blueberries and one cup sugar together twenty minutes. 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter 2 eggs
A two-line dessert that assumes you have the Snow Puffs page open in front of you. What is printed here is really the sauce, plus a stray ingredient list that belongs to the puffs themselves.
- It is a cross-reference, not a standalone recipeNothing here tells you how to make the puffs; you need the Snow Puffs entry for the method, pan and cooking time. Treat this page as a sauce recipe with a serving suggestion attached.
- The trailing ingredient listThe trailing "1 cup sugar, 1 cup butter, 2 eggs" was checked against the printed page and matches what our text gives. It belongs to the puff batter carried over from the Snow Puffs rule, not to the sauce, which takes only berries and sugar.
- Puffs of this eraPuffs of this period were generally baked or steamed in individual cups or small moulds rather than dropped like fritters. This page gives no vessel, heat or time -- those belong to the Snow Puffs rule -- so buttered custard cups or a muffin tin filled two-thirds are a modern guess rather than the book's instruction.
- The sauce needs no added waterTwo cups of berries with a cup of sugar will draw their own juice if you start them over low heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Only raise the heat once there is liquid in the pan, or the sugar scorches before the fruit breaks down.
- Twenty minutes is a long cookAt a full boil that ratio reduces towards a thick preserve and will firm up considerably as it cools. For a pouring sauce, ten to twelve minutes at a gentle simmer should be enough; if you cook the full twenty, thin it with a spoonful or two of water off the heat.
- SweetnessOne cup of sugar to two cups of berries is a 1907 proportion and reads very sweet now. Half that, with a squeeze of lemon, gives a sauce that tastes of blueberry rather than syrup.
- BerriesFrozen wild blueberries work well and need no thawing, though they release more liquid, so allow a few extra minutes of reduction. Cultivated berries are milder and benefit from the lemon.
- YieldRoughly a cup to a cup and a half of sauce, depending on how far you reduce it; enough to surround several individual puffs.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which is why so much of the dessert section leans on cocoa and confectionery. Puffs of this sort belong to the older English family of small steamed and baked puddings served in a pool of sauce, a format that survived in American cookbooks long after the great boiled puddings had faded. Blueberries were an obvious New England choice: the low-bush wild berry was picked and sold in quantity across Maine and the Maritimes through the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period often used "blueberry" and "huckleberry" more or less interchangeably. The instruction to simply borrow the rule from another page is characteristic of the book's economy, and a reminder that these volumes were written for cooks who read them cover to cover rather than one recipe at a time.