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Huckleberry Pie, or Whortleberry
To two cupfuls of huckleberries, add one-half cupful of ripe currants, a cupful of granulated sugar, with which a tablespoonful of flour has been mixed, and stir all well together. Line the sides of a shallow pudding dish with flaky pie crust, put in the fruit; cover with a sheet of paste, make several incisions for the escape of steam and bake until the crusts are nicely browned.
A plain fruit pie with no oven temperature, no time, and no bottom crust in the strict sense — the paste lines the sides only. A few details need translating.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither. As a modern starting point, bake hot (around 425F) for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then lower to about 375F for a further 30-35 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents rather than merely until the crust colours.
- Huckleberry or whortleberryBoth names covered wild Vaccinium and Gaylussacia berries in American usage. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly; true huckleberries are seedier and more acid, so taste and adjust sugar.
- The currants are structuralThe half cup of ripe currants supplies acid, and some pectin, that huckleberries are short of. If you skip them, a tablespoon of lemon juice will keep the filling from tasting flat.
- Only one tablespoon of flourThat is light thickening by modern standards for two and a half cups of fruit. Two tablespoons of flour, or a scant tablespoon of cornstarch, gives a filling that slices rather than floods.
- "Line the sides"Read this literally: pastry up the walls of a shallow dish, fruit in, lid on top. If you prefer a conventional fully lined pie, blind-bake the base briefly or the wet fruit will soften it.
- Shallow pudding dishA shallow ovenproof baking dish of about 8-9 inches. A standard pie plate works; the quantity of fruit is small, so do not reach for a deep dish.
- YieldFour to six modest servings. The filling barely fills a 9-inch plate, so scale up by half again if you want a generous pie.
"Whortleberry" is the older English word — a variant of hurtleberry, used for bilberries and their relatives — and "huckleberry" is generally traced to it as an American corruption. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used the two interchangeably because the berries themselves were gathered wild rather than bought, and nobody was much concerned with which species had come out of the woods. Cultivated highbush blueberries were not commercially available until the twentieth century was well under way, so a book of this vintage assumes a picked, not purchased, fruit.