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Blackberry Pie
Look over carefully, wash and drain one and one-half cups of blackberries. Cook until tender with just enough water to prevent burning. Add sugar to taste and a pinch of salt. Line plate with paste, shape a ring of the paste around the rim of plate, fill with berries which have become partially cool, and arrange strips of pastry across the top. Put on another rim around edge and bake thirty minutes in slow oven.
A pre-cooked fruit filling in a lattice-topped shell, written for a smaller pie plate than most people own today. The quantities and the oven note both need translating.
- Scale up the fruitThe cup and a half is measured raw, before cooking, and makes only a thin filling in a small plate. For a standard 9-inch pie plate use 4 to 5 cups of raw blackberries.
- "Slow oven"Usually reckoned at about 300 to 325F. Because the filling is already cooked, the baking time is only setting and colouring the crust; at that heat for thirty minutes a bottom crust may stay pale. Bake hotter, around 400F for 25 to 30 minutes, or blind-bake the bottom shell before filling.
- "Paste" and "plate"Paste is pastry dough, plate is the pie plate. You need enough for a bottom crust, two narrow rim strips and lattice strips — about a double-crust quantity.
- The two rimsThe first ring of dough laid on the plate rim gives the lattice ends something to stick to; the second ring goes over the ends to seal them. Damp the dough lightly between layers or they separate in the oven.
- ThickeningNo flour or cornstarch is called for, so the filling relies on being cooked down. Simmer the berries until the juice is syrupy, or stir in a tablespoon of cornstarch slaked in cold water per 3 cups of fruit and cook a minute more.
- Sugar to tasteWild blackberries vary enormously. Start at 1/2 cup of sugar per quart of raw berries and taste the cooked fruit before it goes into the shell — once the pie is assembled you cannot adjust it.
- Cool before filling"Partially cool" matters. Hot filling can soften the fat in the bottom crust before the oven sets it, and the base suffers.
- YieldOne small pie. Best eaten the day it is made; a pre-cooked filling tends to weep into the pastry overnight.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern company, part of a publishing empire built around The Delineator and aimed squarely at the middle-class housekeeper who also bought her dress patterns by mail. Its blackberry pie reflects a fruit that was, in many American households of the period, gathered rather than bought — blackberries ripened in hedgerows, fence lines and cut-over woodland from July into September, and the small quantity here suggests a pie built from whatever a morning's picking produced. Cooking the berries before they go into the shell is one of two methods current at the time, raw-fruit pies being equally common: it drives off water, lets the cook judge the sugar against genuinely variable wild fruit, and shortens the time in a coal or wood range whose temperature was managed by damper and feel rather than by dial. The doubled pastry rim is a practical detail from the same world, a way of anchoring lattice strips securely without the crimping tools and chilled-dough habits of later baking.