I don’t have the kind of recipe book that appears in Glass and Feathers. If you haven’t read my Cinderella continuation novel, one of my characters, Mother, is a healer who lives in the woods. She has a book filled with drawings and descriptions of plants and recipes of the herbal remedies she makes with them. It is a spell book of sorts, including entries from many different hands made over years and years.
While I don’t have such a recipe book, I do have an inherited treasure that’s a bit similar. It’s my mom’s 1961 Betty Crocker cookbook. I don’t use most of the book, but the recipes I do use are family favorites so delicious that special occasions wouldn’t be special without them. Besides, the dog-eared, flour-spattered pages with my mom’s writing are comforting. And over the years, my husband and I have made this book our own by writing in it too.
Here's a favorite I make every July: Fresh Berry Pie (courtesy of Betty) with my mother-in-law’s recipe for the crust. There’s a kind of magic to using our family inheritance. Enjoy!
For a 9” Pie:
1 to 1 ½ cups sugar (depending on the sweetness of your berries)
1/3 cup flour
½ t. cinnamon
4 cups fresh blueberries (Betty says you can use other berries—but blueberries are our favorite)
1 ½ T. butter
Crust:
2 ¼ cups flour
1 t. salt
¾ cup butter
5 T. cold water (more or less as needed)
Heat oven to 425°.
Mix flour and salt in bowl. Cut in butter with pastry blender or two knives. (I actually use my hands, but you do you.) Add water to flour/butter mixture, 1 tablespoon at a time, and mix with a fork. Once dough is formed, divide in half. Roll out each half to form the bottom and top halves, placing bottom half in pie pan.
Mix flour, sugar, and cinnamon, then mix into the berries. Pour mixture into pastry-lined pan and dot with butter. Cover with top crust with slits in it and seal. (I usually sprinkle the top crust with some sugar, but that’s optional—it’s quite sweet already.)
Cover the edges with strips of foil to prevent over-browning. Bake 35-45 minutes or until crust is nicely brown and juice is bubbling up through the slits in the crust. Serve slightly warm, but not hot. It’s also delicious cold.
Lissa Sloan is the author of Glass and Feathers, a dark continuation of the traditional Cinderella tale. Her fairy tale poems and short stories have appeared in The Fairy Tale Magazine, Niteblade Magazine, Corvid Queen, Three Ravens Podcast, and anthologies from World Weaver Press. Visit Lissa online at lissasloan.com, or connect on Facebook, Instagram, @lissa_sloan, or Twitter, @LissaSloan.
Images by Lissa Sloan.
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