HFF: 6.11 Picnic

The Challenge: Picnic. Make picnic food or a dish that's easy to eat outside.

The Recipe: Blackberry Pie from The Young Housekeeper's Friend

 

I took this to the July 4 reenacting event (held on July 2), so I'm counting it as a picnic food.

 

The Date/Year and Region: 1846, Boston

How Did You Make It: After reading all the contradictory instructions on pastry, I started with the "good common pie crust" of flour and butter, omitting the lard, salt, and saleratus discussed in the general paste instructions. The proportions given made no sense (1 heaping handful of flour per pie, 2 large spoons of butter for 3 pies), so I tweaked them to 2 heaping handfuls of flour for 1 double-crust pie, 4 tablespoons of butter, and 1/4 cup of water to help form the paste with the flour and half the butter. The rest of the butter was cut small and rolled into the crust in two layers.

Before starting on the paste, I buttered the pie tin, washed 2 pints of blackberries, and pre-heated the oven to 400F. Once I had the paste made, I cut out the top crust, set it aside, and re-rolled the scraps to make the bottom crust. I placed the bottom crust in position, added the pint of berries, sprinkled it all over with 5 large spoonfuls (soup-spoons) of granulated sugar, then swiped around the edges of the crust with water, and sprinkled both fruit and crust-edge with flour. Per the instructions, I tried to keep the berries level with the top of the tin. I laid the top crust in position, pinched it at the sides, and cut off the small bits of excess crust (while also patching one small hole). I pricked the initials "US" into the top crust with a fork, then baked it at 400F for 45 or 50 minutes.

 

Time to Complete: About 20 minutes to prepare and 45-50 minutes to bake.

 

Total Cost: $6 for blackberries, all else on hand

How Successful Was It?: Tasty enough. The crust wasn't oozing butter like my puff paste usually does, and I'm working on not overworking the pastry.

How Accurate Is It? I'm actually feeling pretty good about this one. The crust had a lot of guesswork, but for once this was the result of having lots of different options made explicit in the text (lard versus butter versus both, saleratus or not, etc.). I did try the trick explained in the text for using water and flour to seal the crust (which worked in the oven--no berry juice bubbled out--even if it ended up leaking juice in transit). Other advice I used from the general pastry instructions included using off-cuts of paste for a bottom crust (but not a top crust), and keeping the pastry itself much thinner than the fruit layer. I also had a replica tin to bake it in.

Blackberry Pie