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Flour (Cup sugar teaspoon salt Line)
2 1/2 cups berries 1/2 cup sugar 1/8 teaspoon salt Line a deep plate with Plain Paste, fill with berries slightly dredged with flour; sprinkle with sugar and salt, cover, and bake forty-five to fifty minutes in a moderate oven.
For sweetening, some prefer to use one-third molasses, the remaining two-thirds to be sugar. Six green grapes (from which seeds have been removed) cut in small pieces much improve the flavor, particularly where huckleberries are used in place of blueberries.
This is a fragment of Fannie Farmer's blueberry (or huckleberry) pie, and the ingredient list has been cut off at the top — what survives is the sugar and salt for a filling that would have called for roughly four cups of berries. Treat the quantities below as the working proportions for a deep 9-inch plate.
- The missing measureThe recipe as printed begins mid-list. A deep plate of this period would take something on the order of 4 cups of berries with the 1/2 cup sugar and 1/8 teaspoon salt; the quantity of flour meant by "slightly dredged" is not given, and a tablespoon or two is the usual reading.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as around 350F, though the book itself gives no temperatures. Forty-five to fifty minutes at that heat suits a filled double-crust fruit pie; look for the juices bubbling thickly rather than merely simmering at the edge.
- Plain PasteFarmer's basic pastry elsewhere in the book: flour, cold fat, salt, and ice water, the fat well under the weight of the flour. Any standard all-butter or lard double-crust dough will stand in.
- Deep plateA "deep plate" of the period is roughly comparable to a modern 9-inch pie dish. A shallow tin will overflow with this much fruit.
- Huckleberries and blueberriesFarmer treats them as interchangeable, but true huckleberries have hard, gritty seeds and a sharper, more resinous flavor. Cultivated blueberries are sweeter and juicier, so you may want the lower end of the sugar.
- The molasses variationReplacing a third of the sugar with molasses gives a dark, slightly bitter filling in the New England manner. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap will overwhelm the fruit entirely.
- The green grapesThe recipe credits them with improving the flavor; six seeded, chopped underripe grapes will also bring acidity and some pectin to flat-tasting berries. A little lemon juice supplies the acid if you have no sour grapes.
- Dredging with flourThe flour on the berries is the only thickener. Toss it through dry fruit before the sugar goes on, or it clumps in the juice and bakes into pale streaks.
- Yield and coolingSix to eight wedges. Let the pie sit at least two hours before cutting; a hot berry pie has not set and will run off the server.
Blueberry and huckleberry pie is one of the plainest expressions of the New England summer larder, built on fruit gathered rather than bought — huckleberries in particular were a wild crop, picked from scrubby pasture and burnt-over land through July and August, and the highbush blueberry was not brought into commercial cultivation until the 1910s, after this book first appeared in 1896. Fannie Farmer's contribution to the form is often said to have been not the pie but the precision, which is why this fragment reads as a list of fractions. The molasses option is generally traced to an older economy, in which molasses was the cheap sweetener and white sugar the expensive one, and the six green grapes are the sort of practical fix a cook passes to another cook — wild berries vary wildly in acidity, and a handful of sour grapes was on hand when a lemon might not be.