Blackberry Pie
Blackberry pie can be made in the same manner as strawberry pie. If the berries are very acid, the same quantity of sugar will be necessary; if very sweet only half as much will be required.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's strawberry pie and only adjusts the sugar. Everything hinges on tasting the fruit before you sweeten it.
- The missing quantityThe original never states how much sugar "the same quantity" means, because it lives in the book's strawberry pie entry, which is not reproduced here. Without that base recipe the amount is unspecified; by modern practice a 9-inch berry pie takes roughly 3/4 to 1 cup sugar for 4-5 cups fruit, and this recipe tells you to halve whatever the strawberry figure is for sweet berries.
- Taste firstWild or early-season blackberries can be sharply acid; cultivated late-summer ones are often sweet enough to need very little. Crush one berry on the tongue before measuring anything, which is exactly what the instruction assumes you will do.
- Seeds and juiceBlackberries are juicy and their seeds are hard. If you want insurance against a flooded bottom crust, a thickener helps: about 3 tablespoons flour or 2 of cornstarch tossed with the fruit. The original gives no such instruction.
- OvenThe text specifies no oven heat; that would have come from the strawberry pie entry. As modern guidance for a double-crust fruit pie: start at 425-450F for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350-375F for another 30-40 minutes until the juice bubbles thickly through the vents.
- YieldNot stated; it follows whatever the strawberry pie makes. If you build it as a 9-inch double-crust pie, reckon six to eight servings, and let it rest before cutting -- a hot blackberry pie will run.
Blackberry pie is the plainest kind of American fruit pie, made from a hedgerow fruit nobody had to buy - blackberries grew on waste ground, roadsides and fence lines across much of the country, and were picked by the pail in summer. That abundance may explain the offhand tone of this entry: a household cook book of this kind assumed its reader already knew how to build a fruit pie and needed only to be told how the fruit differed from the last one. The sugar caveat is the useful part, and it reflects a period when berries came from whatever bushes were nearest rather than from a graded, uniformly ripe supply. Cross-referencing like this was common in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cook books, where a chapter on pies could cover a dozen fruits by describing one in full and the rest by exception.