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Mildred Trueman’s Blueberry Bang Belly Page is a collection of blueberry dessert recipes from the Maritimes. I can’t vouch for them because I’m still dieting, but they look good, and their names are charming: Blueberry Dog Belly. Blueberry Buckle. Blueberry Grunt. Blueberry Bang Belly.
She also has recipes for rhubarb and for fiddlehead ferns, but the names aren’t nearly so exotic.
I make a bang-up blueberry grunt, if I do say so myself. It's a New England thing, as far as I know.
I think the Blueberry Dog Belly has to be related to Spotted Dog.
Having been born in Nova Scotia, I can attest to the fine blueberries and recipes in the Maritimes. There are people who actually take holidays (as well as people who collect the dole and roust themselves to do same, this being a depressed area) just so they can pick wild berries in ditches and what not when they come into season, and then sell them on the side of the road.
Mmm. I'm thinking of Grandma's Mixed Berry Trifle now, fresh raspberries and strawberries from the back yard and blueberries from down the road. Drooling like Homer...
According to the Joy of Cooking, which has taxonomies for everything, "grunt" and "buckle" are in fact the proper names for specific types of fruit desserts. (The Joy offers a masterful discourse on the nature and distinguishing characteristics of these and other fruit ensembles, including pandowdies, cobblers, slumps, dumplings, turnovers, crisps, crunches, crumbles, brown betties, kuchens, and clafoutis. And that's entirely leaving out the separate chapter on all manner of fruit pies.)
A grunt, as it happens, is a sort of fruit dumpling "steamed in a mold inside a kettle full of water and inverted when served." Were it cooked in a covered pan and served dumpling side up, it would instead be a slump. A buckle is a cake made from fruit-filled batter and topped with streusel. "The cake buckles in spots from the weight of the topping before the batter sets, creating pockets of caramelized sugar and butter." The Joy is curiously silent, however, on the nature of the elusive bang belly.
I'd go on, but I'm paralyzed by the recipe for the mango-pear crisp, topped with melting bits of crystallized ginger. Surely there's an all-night grocery store around here somewhere. I need to start baking now.