It was the blueberry, however, and not the huckleberry that botanists hybridized at the beginning of this century to produce many cultivated varieties of highbush berry, with names like Earliblue, Late Blue, Blueray, and Bluetta. And it was the cultivated blueberry that the New World sent to the Old in 1946 in the form of eight highbush plants to be nurtured in Dorset, England, formerly the heart of whortleberry country. Or so Jane Grigson noted in her 1985 British Cookery , wherein she suggests using blueberries in that quintessentially English dish, Summer Pudding. The first English colonists put blueberries in their traditional puddings of fruit and dough, but as the English language turned American, so did pudding names. Typical of more high-toned recipes for blueberries were the batter breads and cakes provided by Eliza Leslie in her 1837 Directions for Cookery .
Recipes abound for good ways to use summer blueberries.
I like to mix blueberries with raspberries or cherries in a compote which also makes a good non-soggy filling for a prebaked tart shell. I do hate gummy crusts or cornstarch thickeners and both nasties can be avoided by using fresh fruit combined with fruit jam. I've also turned back to the Indian tradition of drying berries, which helps today's cultivated blueberry recapture some of the intensity of its wild relative. Drying berries is easy. Berries fully dried will keep indefinitely in a plastic bag or glass jar.