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Huckleberries and Cream
Thoroughly wash and drain a quart very fresh sound huckleberries. Place them on a compotier and serve with powdered sugar and thick cream separately.
Barely a recipe, and that is the point: the whole thing rests on the fruit and the cream. Two of its four nouns mean something different now than they did when it was written.
- A quart of berriesBerries were sold by dry volume, not weight. A US dry quart is a little over four and a half cups, on the order of a pound and a half of huckleberries or blueberries, which serves four generously.
- CompotierA footed glass or porcelain dish for fruit, of the sort that stood on a dessert table. Any shallow bowl works; the shape matters only in that the berries should sit in a single loose layer rather than compact under their own weight.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch and will taste chalky on wet fruit; superfine dissolves cleanly.
- Thick creamUnwhipped heavy cream, poured from a pitcher, not whipped cream. British-style double cream is the nearest thing to what the writer had in mind; American heavy cream at 36 percent fat is thinner but correct in kind.
- Drain properlyWater clinging to the skins dilutes the cream and makes the sugar bleed. Wash, then spread on a towel and let the berries dry to the touch before they go into the dish.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are wild and mostly foraged in the Northwest and the Appalachians; nineteenth-century American cooks often used the name loosely for wild lowbush blueberries as well. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly, though they are sweeter and blander.
- ServingSugar and cream go to the table separately so each eater sugars to taste. Serve cold but not ice-cold, since heavy chilling dulls the fruit's aroma.
Huckleberries were one of the few fruits in nineteenth-century America that essentially could not be farmed: the plants resist cultivation, so the berries arrived in markets from wild pickings, in season, and briefly. That scarcity explains the reverence of a recipe that does nothing but wash them. Cookbooks of the period were full of such fruit courses, placed at the end of long menus where the kitchen's job was to select and present rather than cook. The word itself is generally traced to a corruption of "hurtleberry," an older English name for the bilberry, transferred by settlers to the similar-looking American fruit; the two names were used almost interchangeably in American kitchens well into the twentieth century, which is why so many old huckleberry recipes work perfectly well with blueberries.