Blueberry Delight
Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
More on 1929 canning recipes. Berries cost nothing but labor, which is why they show up in every preserving guide of the period. George Washington Carver's canning bulletin gave a method for huckleberries — twelve quarts of berries to one quart of sugar, heated slowly and boiled a quarter hour from the moment the kettle began to bubble — and huckleberries and wild blueberries grew thick in the sandy pine country of the Eastern Shore and southern New Jersey, close enough to Baltimore that families picked them on day trips and vendors sold them by the quart in city markets. The Afro-American's proportions run much sweeter than Carver's, three pounds of sugar to four pounds of fruit, because this is a preserve meant to be sold or set on a table rather than a plain canned fruit meant to be cooked later. That difference is the difference between subsistence and a product. The warning at the end about watching for leaks is the most practical line in the whole article: a bad seal costs a cook her sugar, her fruit, her fuel, and her afternoon.
Blueberry Delight
Ingredients
4 lbs. blueberries
3 lbs. sugar
Directions
Pick over, wash, and stem the berries. Add three pounds of sugar to each four pounds of berries and heat gently until the sugar dissolves and the juice draws out of the fruit. Cook rapidly until the berries plump and the syrup thickens. Pack carefully in clean, hot jars and seal. Watch for leakage.
"Summer Fruits for Winter Use," Afro-American, August 31, 1929, 13.
