This family recipe gives you an insider’s taste of Marin County right at home.
Elizabeth Ann Hill is a certified natural chef, but that’s probably not the reason she’ll feel like your new best friend when you follow her hospitable lead through the fertile West Marin, an unusually bounteous and beautiful rural region just north of California’s Golden Gate in Marin County. She knows the place like the fourth-generation local she is, and she shares that insider knowledge with visitors through her deliciously informative West Marin Food & Farm Tours.
Till you can get there yourself to experience the bounty of West Marin firsthand, Hill’s got something to tide you over: her grandmother’s famous huckleberry tarts. “My grandparents started coming to Inverness [near Point Reyes in West Marin] from their home in Berkeley in the 1800s. They really got into the huckleberries and would send all us kids into the forest to pick them and keep us occupied.”
Hill has shared her grandmother’s huckleberry tart recipe with C&I.
Norma’s Huckleberry Tart
Crust
1 cup flour
2 tablespoons sugar
½ cup butter, chilled
1 tablespoon vinegar (almond milk can be used as a substitute)
Blend briefly in a food processor. Then pour and press into 10-inch tart tin.
Filling
2 cups huckleberries, plus 2 more cups for topping
½ cup sugar
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch of salt
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix ingredients thoroughly and pour into the prepared tart tin. Bake for 40 minutes. Remove from oven and top with fresh berries before serving.
Web exclusive for the October 2017 Taste of the West issue.
