One of my favorite food seasons of the year has arrived: blueberry season. To me, the best blueberries — around for only a short time — are the low-bush berries often called “wild.” Nationally, these tiny blue pearls are associated with Maine. Locally, they are associated with Heath. There, the high elevation perfectly suits these small fruits from small plants.
To me, Heath blueberries taste better than their lowland, high-bush counterparts. I know some people disagree with me. I have a neighbor who always chooses the larger, high-bush berries, but give me the delicate low-bush ones every time.
When these tiny blue pearls are in season, I always think of my mother. She frequently repeated, “Wild blueberries taste sweeter than the big, cultivated ones,” and she certainly convinced me. Last week, I decided to make one of her favorite blueberry dishes in her memory. She baked a Blueberry Sally Lunn every year at this time.
The original Sally Lunn cakes hail from Bath, England, first arising in the 17th century. Like many recipes, this one has at least a couple of origin stories. One is that a Huguenot refugee named Solange Luyon (whose name was quickly Anglicized) wanted to make a bun that would mimic the brioches of her native land.
Another theory agrees that the Sally Lunn bun is French, but suggests that the name comes from “soleil et lune,” which translates to sun and moon in English, and refers to the golden exterior and white interior of the cake.
Rather strangely, my mother’s Sally Lunn bore little resemblance to the original French-English Sally Lunn bun, which used yeast for its rise. Instead, her version was a cross between a quick bread and a coffee cake, utilizing a chemical leavening: baking powder. I can no longer ask her where she got the name or the recipe, but I use both in her honor. Her Sally Lunn is tasty, just sweet enough to appeal to children and adults alike, and beautifully studded with blueberries.
I hadn’t made it in years before I hauled out the recipe last week. In fact, the last time I made it was when we buried my mother’s ashes. This burial took place several years after her 2011 death. The ashes lived in a smooth wooden box in my living room for some time, right next to smaller boxes containing the ashes of her last pets, Truffle the dog and Lorelei Lee the cat, who died after she did. They were her loyal companions at the end of her life, so I’m sure her spirit took pleasure in hanging out with them in the afterlife. I certainly enjoyed greeting all of them as I passed the shelf on which they rested.
The delay in popping the maternal ashes into the ground made a sort of sense, at least to me. She died in December, when the ground was frozen. I’m sure a hole could have been dug at that time, but it seemed unfilial to bury her when it was so cold outside. We had a nice memorial party but held onto the ashes.
For years after that, I waited for the right moment. I wanted my closest relatives present: my brother David, his wife Leigh and their son Michael. They all visited from time to time, but they didn’t generally do so together until 2018, when we finally managed to bury the ashes. The wait brought an unexpected benefit: by 2018, my nephew Michael, who was rather small when his grandmother died, was big enough to wield a shovel.
I didn’t do any shoveling. I just made Sally Lunn, took a couple of pictures and savored my mother’s epitaph. That epitaph came from one of her professors at Mount Holyoke College, which is also my own alma mater.
When I was in college, I was fascinated by the Friday-afternoon faculty cocktail parties. I wasn’t allowed to attend, however, as students were not invited.
After I graduated, I dragooned one of my former professors into taking me along one Friday afternoon. There, I met an elderly, retired philosophy professor named Roger Holmes. My mother had taken only one class from Mr. Holmes, but she had told me all about him. He was charming and brilliant — and he also carried the cachet of having taught cryptography to Mount Holyoke students in secret during World War II to support the war effort.
Unfortunately, those cryptography courses came after my mother’s graduation, though I’m sure she would have relished working as a code breaker. When I met Roger Holmes at the cocktail party, I introduced myself and said, “I don’t know whether you remember my mother, but she remembers you. Janice Hallett, Class of 1939?”
He thought for a moment, then smiled and nodded.
“Short and full of life,” he pronounced.
The family, including my mother, decided immediately that the description was so apt it had to go on her gravestone. Now that I think of it, “short and full of life” could also perfectly characterize her beloved low-bush blueberries.
If you are concerned that your blueberries will sink in the cake — mine generally don’t, but I have seen this happen — reserve a tablespoon or two of the flour and toss it into the blueberries before adding them to the batter.
Jan Weisblat’s Blueberry Sally Lunn
Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) sweet butter at room temperature
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1-3/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
1 cup blueberries (or more—really, the more the merrier!)
1/3 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/3 teaspoon cinnamon
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together the butter and the white sugar. Beat the eggs together and then beat them into the butter-sugar combination.
Sift together the flour, the baking powder, and the salt; then add those dry ingredients and the milk, alternately, to the butter-sugar-egg mixture. Fold in the berries.
Pour the batter into a greased 8-by-8-inch baking dish, and top with the brown sugar and cinnamon. Bake for 50 minutes. Serves 9 (with big pieces) to 12 (with tiny pieces).
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Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com