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Huckleberry Pudding
1 egg, 1 cup sugar. 1 cup milk 1½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 pint berries 1 heaping tablespoon butter Beat the egg with the sugar and butter; add the milk and sifted flour and baking powder. When thoroughly mixed add the huckleberries, previously washed and drained and dredged with flour. Pour into a buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven. Serve with lemon or fruit sauce.
A plain baked berry batter pudding, closer to a cobbler or a buckle than to a steamed pudding. The printed ingredient list is incomplete, so read the method before you shop.
- Missing ingredientsThe method calls for an egg and sugar, neither of which appears in the list. One egg and about 3/4 cup sugar suit the quantity of batter; the amount of sugar is genuinely a guess, so adjust to how tart the berries are.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. Bake roughly 40-50 minutes in a buttered 8-inch square or 2-quart dish, until the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean of batter.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are a wild Eastern and Western fruit rarely sold fresh. Blueberries are the standard substitute and behave the same in batter; a pint is about 10-12 oz, or roughly 2 cups.
- Dredging with flourThis is the hinge. Tossing the drained berries in a spoonful of flour keeps them suspended rather than sunk in a purple seam at the bottom. Take the flour from the measured 1 1/2 cups so the batter is not stiffened.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is a heavy hand by current standards, though such proportions are common in recipes of this period. With modern double-acting powder it may taste faintly metallic; 1 1/2 teaspoons is closer to current practice.
- ButterA heaping tablespoon is roughly 1 1/2 tablespoons, softened. Cream it with the sugar and egg as written; melted butter gives a denser crumb.
- Lemon sauceThe period standby is a cornstarch-thickened sugar syrup finished with lemon juice, zest and a lump of butter, served warm. Cream or vanilla ice cream does the same job.
- YieldSix to eight servings. Best warm, within a few hours of baking; it goes gummy under refrigeration.
Huckleberry puddings turn up throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks because the fruit was gathered rather than bought, arriving in quantity for a few midsummer weeks and needing to be used quickly. The name is generally traced to a corruption of "hurtleberry," an English name for the bilberry, applied by colonists to the similar-looking American fruit; "huckleberry" and "blueberry" were often used interchangeably in print. A cake-like baked pudding of this sort could be assembled quickly and served with a boiled sauce made from the same pantry.