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Wild Berry Pies and Pancakes
Why certainly pies can be baked on an open fire-and sometimes Nature provides the filling!
Battle Creek Camp Fire Girls turned true gypsy on their gypsy trip and made use of what came along. They had a hankering for blueberry pies-the sort of hankering that wouldn't get very far with most people who found themselves on a sandy beach without an oven and without any blueberries. But they managed to construct an oven from the wreckage of an old oil stove, the top of which they used, tilted, for their reflector, and two trays, wired together, for their oven. They went looking for blueberries, and came back with huckleberries, and then wondered just how you make pie without a recipe. We can hardly believe this, but they say they "added a heap of Crisco to a bowl of flour and a bit of salt and cut it until it resembled a fine meal and made delicious pie!" We are afraid to let you try this, if you're short of supplies, so we give you a recipe: 3 CUPS FLOUR I CUP SHORTENING I TEASPOON SALT I CUP WATER 4 CUPS BLUEBERRIES 2 CUPS SUGAR You can use a milk bottle for a rolling pin, and we leave the pastry board to your own ingenuity-if you're like the Battle Creek gypsies you'll resent even this much help. When it's huckleberry time in Michigan, camp cooks use them in pancakes, too. They add a cup of the washed berries to a regular pancake recipe, and serve the golden cakes with butter and brown sugar.
A camp pastry built for a reflector oven, with a berry filling given only as fruit and sugar. Two of the quantities want checking before you start.
- The water is the problemOne cup of water to three cups of flour will give you paste, not pastry. Standard proportions for this much flour and fat are 6 to 8 tablespoons of ice water, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds together.
- YieldThree cups of flour and a cup of shortening make enough for one double-crust 9-inch pie with generous trimmings; most double-crust recipes call for about two to two and a half cups of flour. The four cups of berries fill one pie comfortably.
- Sugar and thickenerTwo cups of sugar to four cups of fruit is heavy by current taste; 3/4 to 1 cup suits most berries. The recipe names no thickener at all, so expect a loose filling unless you toss the fruit with 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour, cornstarch or tapioca.
- ShorteningCrisco and its kin are hydrogenated vegetable shortening, reformulated since this was written to remove trans fats. Modern shortening behaves much the same in pastry; chilled butter or lard will give more flavour and a firmer edge.
- Huckleberries are not blueberriesHuckleberries are not always blueberries -- True huckleberries have larger, crunchier seeds and a sharper, more resinous flavour, though in Michigan the name has often been applied to wild blueberries. If the fruit runs juicy, use the higher end of the thickener range.
- Reflector oven heatA reflector set against a bed of coals gives a fierce, uneven and unmeasurable heat; judge it by whether you can hold a hand in front of the tin for more than a few seconds. Turn the pie 180 degrees halfway through, since the side facing the fire browns first. In a conventional oven, 425F for 15 minutes, then 375F for 30 to 40 minutes until the juices bubble thickly.
- PancakesA cup of washed berries folded into batter at the last moment, not beaten in; folding early bleeds colour through the whole batch. Berries make the cakes wetter, so cook them a little slower than plain ones.
The Camp Fire Girls, founded in 1910, built their programme around practical outdoor skills, and cookery ranked with woodcraft and canoeing among the honours a girl could earn; camp cookbooks of the period are full of exactly this sort of improvisation, with the ingenuity valued as highly as the result. Crisco, brought out by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was still a relatively new product when books like this were circulating, and it travelled far better than butter or lard on a hot-weather trip, which is why it turns up in camp pastry so often. The reflector oven described here, a tilted sheet of bright metal throwing fire heat onto a pan, was standard equipment for baking away from a stove and remains the simplest way to bake over an open fire. Michigan's huckleberry and blueberry barrens have long drawn summer pickers, and the two names have been used loosely for each other across much of the country for well over a century.