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Blackberry Mush
To two quarts ripe berries add one and a half pints boiling water, and one pound sugar; cook a few moments, then stir in a pint of wheat flour, boil a few moments longer, put in greased mold to cool, and serve with cream or hard sauce. - Miss H. D. Martin, New York City.
A fruit mush thickened with plain flour, closer to a Scandinavian fruit pudding or an Italian budino than to anything baked. The whole dish hinges on how the flour goes in and how long it cooks.
- Slurry the flour, and cook it outA pint of flour stirred dry into boiling fruit juice will seize into lumps immediately. Whisk it with a cup of cold water into a smooth cream first, then stream it into the simmering berries. "Boil a few moments" is too short: the starch needs 8-10 minutes of gentle bubbling, stirred constantly, or the finished mush tastes of raw flour.
- Measures in modern termsTwo quarts of ripe blackberries is roughly 3 lb; 1 1/2 pints of water is 3 cups; a pound of sugar is 2 1/4 cups. A pint of flour, measured by volume as the period did, is roughly 2 cups or 8 to 9 oz.
- That is a lot of sugarA pound of sugar to some 3 lb of ripe berries gives a very sweet pudding by current taste. Half the sugar still sets and slices perfectly well, since the flour, not the sugar, is doing the thickening.
- SeedsBlackberry seeds are conspicuous in a smooth mush. If you object to them, cook the berries with the water alone for a few minutes, press through a sieve or food mill, then return the puree to the pan and proceed with the sugar and flour.
- The moldYou need a mold or loaf pan of at least 2 quarts, and probably larger given the volume of berries, water and flour, greased with butter or a neutral oil. Chill several hours, and preferably overnight, before turning out; a warm mush will slump.
- Hard sauceNot a cooked sauce. It is butter creamed with powdered sugar and a flavoring, chilled firm, so it melts over the warm or cool pudding. Cream, as the recipe also allows, is plain heavy cream, unwhipped.
- YieldServes eight to ten. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator, though the surface will darken.
Flour-thickened fruit puddings were one common way to stretch a summer glut before gelatin was cheap and commonplace in American kitchens; the same logic lies behind Danish rødgrød, German rote Grütze (though those are more often set with potato starch or semolina) and the cornstarch fruit puddings that fill later community cookbooks. The Dixie Cook Book, first issued in the 1880s, was assembled from contributed receipts and credits them to their donors, which is why a blackberry dish here carries a New York City address rather than a Southern one -- these compilations circulated nationally and drew on whoever would write in. Blackberries in this period were still widely gathered wild from fencerows and roadsides, as well as grown commercially, which may be part of why a recipe can begin confidently with two quarts.