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Apple Grunt, Blueberry, and Other Grunts
Heat 1 quart thin applesauce, sweetened and flavored with cloves or cinnamon, in a saucepan without a handle. Cover with shortcake dough, tie waxed paper over top, steam 30 minutes in a kettle of boiling water.
Blueberry or Huckleberry Grunt and other Berry Grunts are made in the same way.
A steamed cobbler with no oven required, which is why it turns up in an outdoor cookbook. The whole method hinges on keeping the water in the outer kettle at a steady boil without letting it splash into the fruit.
- The vesselA "saucepan without a handle" simply means a pot that will sit down inside a larger kettle with the lid on. A 1 1/2- to 2-quart straight-sided pot, a wide heatproof bowl, or a lidless pudding basin all work; the handle is only in the way.
- Water levelSet the inner pot on a rack, a canning ring, or a folded cloth so it does not touch the kettle bottom, and keep the boiling water about halfway up its side. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates so the kettle never runs dry.
- Waxed paperWaxed paper tied down over the top is what this recipe calls for. Parchment or foil, crimped tight or tied, does the same job. The point is to keep condensation off the dough, so a domed cover rather than a flat one helps.
- Shortcake doughShortcake dough here means a biscuit-type dough -- flour, baking powder, salt, butter rubbed in, milk to bind, usually lightly sweetened -- not a British shortcrust. Drop it over the fruit in spoonfuls or pat it into a single round about 3/4 inch thick; it should cover the surface but need not seal the edges.
- Thin applesauce"Thin" matters. A quart of loose, pourable sauce keeps the underside of the dough moist as it steams; thick sauce gives up little moisture and leaves the topping dry.
- Timing and donenessThirty minutes of hard steaming is what the recipe calls for. Resist lifting the cover early -- the trapped steam is what cooks the top. A skewer into the dough should come out clean; if it does not, re-cover and give it a little longer.
- Berry versionsFor blueberry, huckleberry, or blackberry, use about a quart of berries with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar and a few spoonfuls of water so juice forms early. Berries release more liquid than applesauce, so expect a looser sauce under the crust.
- YieldA quart of fruit with its topping serves four to six. Spoon it out fruit-side-up and serve hot, with cream if you have it.
The grunt belongs to a family of New England fruit puddings -- grunt, slump, pandowdy -- that were made without reliable home ovens and survived in camp and cottage cooking long after ovens arrived, precisely because they need only a fire and a kettle of water. The name is generally traced to the noise the fruit is said to make as it bubbles under the dough, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Apple and blueberry are the two standbys because both were preserved or gathered in quantity in the Northeast, and applesauce in particular kept well in jars, making this the kind of dessert a cook could assemble from stores at a lakeside camp.