Category: Desserts

Wild Blackberry Pie

On Sunday afternoons in summer, our family went “a-berrying.” In late July we picked raspberries, which was challenging. Raspberries have an annoying habit of sagging in your pail. You set the pail down when it looks nearly full, rest a few minutes in the shade and come back to find that your nearly full pail is now only three-fourths full.

Blackberries don’t do that. Raspberries are like teenagers filling a car for a ride around town. I can almost hear them saying, “Hey guys, get in. We’ll scrunch together and there’ll be plenty of room.” Blackberries are different. They’re like friends who want shoulder room when you crawl into the tent. The first thing you hear is “Don’t crowd us.”

Wild blackberries are larger than wild raspberries, and unlike their red cousins, blackberries have a solid core, which explains why they don’t sag as much in your pail. The only serious disadvantage of blackberries is that blackberry bushes are equipped with thorns. Reach for a particularly nice cluster of berries and you may find your arm trapped by a cane that you overlooked in your eagerness. With luck and some patience you can often retrieve the arm with only minor damage. If not, think of the words of wisdom from my father. “Stop fussing. You’ll heal.” It’s true.

My mother would scrub our hands and arms and sometimes put lotion on the deeper scratches. Then she and Dad would sort and wash the berries. When we found “good picking” we would bring home gallons of berries that Mom turned into jam, canned for winter desserts or baked into pies.

I don’t have my mother’s recipe for blackberry pie. Perhaps she never wrote it down, as it was a pie she had been making since she was a young girl. She stirred berries, flour, sugar, salt and cinnamon together and spooned the fruit into a crust she made while the oven was heating. When the wind-up timer went “Brrrng,” she would check the result and either take the pie from the oven or give it a few more minutes.

The first few years we lived in the country we had a wood cook stove, so baking a pie in August made the kitchen even more uncomfortable, but we liked them and blessed the cool breezes that often came in the evening as we ate our warm pie. If we were really lucky, our way home from the blackberry patch took us through Hayward, so Dad could buy a quart of ice cream packed by a soda jerk at the drug store. Pie and ice cream: Heaven!

This recipe produces a pie that reminds me of the ones we ate every August and September when I was growing up.

INGREDIENTS:

Double crust dough for nine inch pie
4 cups wild blackberries
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup + 1 T sugar, divided
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
Dash of salt
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 teaspoon butter
1 T milk

Preheat the oven to 400º.

Blend the flour, three-quarters of a cup of sugar, cinnamon and salt together in a mixing bowl. Stir the blackberries into the dry ingredients. Add a teaspoon of lemon juice and mix thoroughly.

Spoon the blackberry filling into a nine-inch pie plate lined with an unbaked crust. Drop three or four small dabs of butter on top of the filling. Using your fingers, dampen the edges of the bottom crust with water, then cover with the top crust. Seal the edges of the top crust to the bottom with your fingers, then trim the edges and finish by pressing with a fork or using your thumbs to make a scalloped edge.

Paint with milk and sprinkle sugar lightly over the surface. Cut four inch-long slits in the top crust and bake the pie on a center shelf for about an hour until the filling is bubbling out of the slits. You might want to put some aluminum foil under the plate in the oven to catch any juice that bubbles out of the pie as it bakes.

Cool the pie on a rack and serve with a scoop or two of good ice cream.

NOTES: It is a good idea to cover the edges of the pie with aluminum foil if they begin getting too dark. If you bake lots of pies, you should consider a pie crust shield. It is just a ring of thin aluminum that covers the edge of the crust as it bakes.

And of course you can substitute cultivated (tame, we called them) blackberries. The pie will still taste pretty darn good.

Easy Cherry Crisp

When the Cherry Man stopped at our house, my sisters and I welcomed him with shouts of joy. Mom was also happy to see him. The truck had a white insulated box with hand-painted cherries decorating the doors on each side. When the driver opened a door to get a can of frozen cherries for my mother, fog rolled toward the ground.

I think that the driver used dry ice to keep the cans frozen on his way from the Door county peninsula in northeast Wisconsin to his customers in the northwestern part of the state where we lived. The Cherry Man was tied in popularity with the Watermelon Man in our family. Both brought exotic foods that we couldn’t grow at our homestead north of Hayward.

They weren’t cheap, but they were tasty. I know that watermelons were a dollar each. This may not seem like much, but a dollar in 1955 had about the same buying power as nine dollars in 2017. You can buy a really nice watermelon for five dollars today. I never learned what the cherries cost, but three or four dollars for a ten pound can represented a major investment.

Incidentally, frozen tart or “pie cherries” as my mother called them are not less expensive today than they were when I was growing up. In fact, they may be more expensive when you can find them. Local grocers do not carry them, and you can easily pay ten dollars a pound when you order them on line. Plus shipping of course.

I don’t think that my father complained about the cost of the cherries, because he liked cherry pie and cherry crisp as much as the rest of the family. He would definitely have approved of the cost of canned cherry pie filling, a product that was not available when I was growing up. I think that a cherry pie or crisp made with fresh or frozen tart cherries tastes better than one made with canned pie filling, but if you can’t afford or even find fresh or frozen cherries, canned filling does just fine.

This recipe proves it.

INGREDIENTS:

1 can cherry pie filling
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 cup old fashioned oatmeal
1 cup + 2 T all-purpose flour
12 T salted butter (1 1/2 sticks)
PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Use a fork to blend the sugar, flour and oatmeal together in a mixing bowl. Chop the cold butter into a half inch dice and cut the butter into the oatmeal mixture with the fork or a pastry blender. When all the dry ingredients have been worked into the butter, you should have dough with crumbs the size of peas with a few larger clumps.

Put half of the dough into a nine inch pie plate and press it with your fingers to make a bottom crust. Bake the crust on a center shelf for twelve to fourteen minutes until it just starts to brown on the edges. Take the crust from the oven to cool for about fifteen minutes.

Spoon the filling evenly over the crust. Use a fork to break up the remaining oatmeal dough as you sprinkle it over the filling. Put the pie plate on a center shelf in the oven and bake the crisp for fifteen to seventeen minutes until the topping is lightly browned.

Cool on a rack and serve with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

NOTES: We think that the best way to serve crisp is slightly warm, so we put each serving into the microwave for a few seconds before adding the scoop of ice cream. Of course you could do as we did when we were kids. We crowded around the hot crisp and waved our hands to cool it until Mom relented and dished it out.

If you are using unsalted butter, stir a quarter teaspoon of salt into the dry ingredients before cutting in the butter.