P+P recipe XIII: Mary’s Bourbon-Soaked Blueberry Buckle
It’s close to midnight and almost a wrap on Giorno dei Morti, Italy’s All Soul’s Day or Day of the Dead, also called the Day Of Remembrance. As you may have guessed, it is a day to remember your departed loved ones by decorating their graves, sending up prayers, and enjoying sweet spiced pastries called pan dei morti or Day of the Dead Bread.
In keeping with tradition my own way, I am honoring my late paternal Grandma Mary, who departed peacefully and sharp as an Agatha Christie letter opener aged 96. I don’t hold many family recipes — my mother and her mother hated to cook and it showed big time — which makes this one pretty precious.
Mary’s blueberry buckle was a staple when I visited her home just outside of Washington D.C. and making it never fails to fill the kitchen with those plumes of bittersweet childhood nostalgia. I miss her, and by extension the childhood I both had and didn’t but desperately wanted.
My grandmother had an unabashed sweet tooth she firmly believed indulging in moderation and her blueberry buckle can be enjoyed for breakfast, dessert, or as an anytime snack. As a nod to her Kentucky roots and one iconic parrot owned by her guardian aunts that would purposely “faint” in order to be revived with a thimbleful of bourbon, I like to soak the blueberries in the spirit overnight before baking.
I’m sure both she and the parrot would approve.
INGREDIENTS:
1/4 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
2 cups fresh blueberries
Optional: Bourbon for soaking the blueberries
FOR THE TOPPING:
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup cold butter, cubed
DIRECTIONS:
In a small bowl, the cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, then combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Add to creamed mixture alternately with milk, beating well after each addition. Fold in blueberries. Pour into greased 9-inch square baking pan.
For the topping: In a small bowl, combine the sugar, flour and cinnamon; cut in butter until crumbly. Sprinkle over blueberry mixture. Bake at 375°F/190°C for 40–45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.
When I was fifteen I stayed with my grandmother for a week during the summer and among our many excursions
Including a trip to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, in which Thee Mary Linstrom, who went back to college after her husband’s passing and got her degree in history from the University of Maryland, eventually led the tour after politely — she was after all a southern lady — asking the guide one too many questions intended to educate her granddaughter; it was brilliant, she was brilliant, and I thought of her often while penning the PASTA+PLAGUE piece on James Hemings
was a visit to the National Gallery of Art. It is and always will be one of my favorite days ever. I swooned over Frederick Leighton’s Flaming June with all the other modern Pre-Ralphaelites, I tried calamari for the first time in what is now the Garden Café; it was neither breaded nor fried but chilled in a delicate ceviche and the first thing I ever ate that felt truly grown-up.
I remember standing before Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci and whispering in my grandmother’s ear a little sheepishly: “I think she’s prettier than the Mona Lisa.”
Grandma Mary leaned in with her trademark grin & twinkle in the eye and whispered back, “I think so too.”
