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Whortleberry Cake
Beat two eggs with one cup sugar; add half cup butter, one of milk, one tea-spoon soda sifted in four cups flour, pinch salt, and one pint fresh whortleberries. Bake, and eat warm. Delicious.
A plain butter cake stiffened with berries, written in the shorthand of an 1880s kitchen: no pan, no oven, no time. The leavening is the part that needs attention.
- The soda has nothing to work onOne teaspoon of soda with sweet milk leaves the batter alkaline, which tastes soapy and turns the crumb yellow-brown. Either use buttermilk or clabbered milk in place of the sweet milk, or substitute 2 teaspoons baking powder for the soda.
- WhortleberriesAn old English name for bilberry that in American books covers huckleberries and wild blueberries indiscriminately. Cultivated blueberries work; a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 10 to 12 oz.
- Four cups of flour is a lotWith only one cup of milk and two eggs, this reads as a very stiff dough rather than a pourable batter. Cup measures were inconsistent and the flour need not have behaved like modern all-purpose, so start with 3 cups and add more only until the dough just holds together; it should be spoonable, like a thick drop-biscuit dough.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 350F. A 9-inch square or a 9x13 pan lined with parchment suits the quantity.
- TimingExpect 35 to 45 minutes in a 9-inch square, less in a wider pan. Test in the center between berries, since the fruit keeps a skewer damp and misleads.
- Keeping the berries upToss the fruit with a tablespoon of the measured flour and fold it in last, with as few strokes as possible. Crushed berries bleed and make gummy streaks.
- Yield and servingAbout 9 to 12 squares. "Eat warm" is meant literally: it is best the day it is baked, plain or with butter.
"Whortleberry" came to America from English dialect, where it named the bilberry of northern moors; it was applied to whatever small blue fruit grew locally, so in nineteenth-century cookbooks it stands in for huckleberries and wild blueberries alike -- both gathered wild rather than bought, since blueberries were not cultivated commercially until the twentieth century. The recipe's brevity assumes a cook who already knows what a cake batter should look like. The Dixie Cook Book, first published in the 1880s and compiled from contributed household receipts, is full of this kind of entry: a list of proportions, a one-word instruction to bake, and a verdict. Berry cakes and berry puddings are common in such books; the fruit did not keep, and a quick soda cake was one way to use a morning's picking.