Skip to main content
Dessert

Hucklebery or Blueberry Pie

A fruit pie made with huckleberries or blueberries, flour, sugar, and butter, baked in a double crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Hucklebery or Blueberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Pick over and wash the berries.

  2. Heap the fruit in the center of a deep pie plate.

  3. Sprinkle with flour and add sugar to taste.

  4. Dot the top with bits of butter.

Bake

  1. Cover with a second crust and bake at 400°F (200°C) for about 45 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Blueberries or huckleberries
Forms the main filling and supplies the juicy body and flavor of the pie.
Flour
Thickens the berry juices as they heat so the filling sets rather than running.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the berries.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, which carries flavor and helps the filling taste rounded.

The step that matters

Sprinkling flour and sugar over the fruit. Flour needs to be spread over the berries so it coats them evenly. This lets it mix into the juices as they heat, thickening them evenly instead of leaving pockets of raw flour or a runny filling.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes