I'm not making pies anymore, but when the blueberries were coming in, every night for dessert I had fresh berries with heavy cream, coconut and a little cinnamon. It was a fabulous dessert.

I don't make blueberry pie (as blueberries are stonkingly exensive here) but when I make blueberry muffins I add a touch of cinnamon. It ramps up the flavour a little notch.

Blueberry pie is one of my families very favorite and I have made many, never using cinnamon, never thought to use it, many times I use lemon. Next time I will try adding cinnamon.....see what you can learn on CF...good place to hang out. Pie making is one of my favorites.

I don't use it in the pie filling itself but after I place and seal the top crust, I brush the entire crust with milk and liberally sprinkle it with a cinnamon sugar mixture before adding the vents. Makes a sweet , crispy brown crust every time.

I use lemon but not cinnamon, but then I've only made blueberry tarts - not blueberry pies. I don't think I would like cinnamon with blueberries, as it would mask the flavor of the blueberry rather than enhance it IMO. I'm not a big fan of cinnamon flavor, although I do use it with apples and oatmeal.

Yep....always add a whiff of cinnamon the the sugar when I make a blue-berry pie....and a bit of grated lemon zest too.

I used to make a chocolate cake with blueberry filling and used cinnamon. A blueberry cobbler recipe that I made last week called for cinnamon. I think it adds a subtle but nice dimension.

Yes. I add cinnamon to many cooked fruit dessert recipes - pies, cobblers, crisps, etc. It helps to bring out the flavor and adds just a lil sumpin :-)) I also put cinnamon in any chocolate dessert for the same reason - it intensifies the chocolatey-ness!!

My recipe calls for 1/4 tsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg as well as lemon zest in the filling. The crust swaps out 3 tbsp of water for lemon juice.

I've also made blueberry pie with a gingersnap crust and white chocolate curls as a garnish. Yum!

Lars, you don't use a lot of cinnamon. The first time DH and I had blueberry muffins with cinnamon, we had to work to decide what that faint background taste was.

No cinnamon, just nutmeg with blueberries for pies and cobblers. Lemon, too.

I had been thinking nutmeg. I haven't used it but was thinking I'd tasted it in others' pies. I keep trying to imagine cinnamon, but I can't get my imagination to combine the flavors, and end up thinking more cinnamon toast + blueberry jam, which I'm sure is not what it tastes like in pie.

A small amount will round out the flavors, too much will dominate the blueberry. I like lemon and only a touch of cinnamon. Nutmeg is an alternative -- I'm thinking both might be overkill, spice-wise.

Not pie-related, but I've been making cobblers to cut down down on the crust and because I'm lazy. I madethis cobbler last week which puts the cinnamon only in the sugar on top of the topping, which is a bit more like a dutch-crunch style. I've also made Bittman's -- his pie recipe uses cinnamon but his cobbler does not.

Just FYI when most Americans say 'Cinnamon' they actually mean cassia, usually from Vietnam. Think of the candy Red-Hots, that's cassia.

True or Ceylon cinnamon is quite different: softer, floral, much more subtle. Add too much sugar and it will mask Ceylon's delicacy.

We're not especially fond of cassia, and tend to use it in much smaller amounts than called for due to its aggressive flavor.

I tend to use allspice or nutmeg more often. With blueberries, I use cardamon, which is a combination my mom learned from the Swedish family she worked for as a teen-aged housemaid, during the WWII relocation camps (you could get out if you agreed to take a job in the interior U.S., so she ended up in Minnesota for a while!).

you could get out if you agreed to take a job in the interior U.S

Thanks. I never heard that before!

And I buy Mexican cinnamon, incidentally, which is always the real thing. Mexico buys pretty much all the output from Ceylon. But I still don't think it belongs in blueberry pie. :)

Cardamom sounds great! Why can I imagine that, but not cinnamon--or cassia!

I don't add cinnamon to blueberry pie, but Grandma's Blueberry Crisp calls for cinnamon and I always put it in there.

Odd, now I'm thinking why NOT in pie but it's in the crisp.....

Annie

I would NOT put cinnamon in blueberry pie. I don't like cinnamon in some things but it's OK in others. I would want it in pumpkin pie or apple pie but I hate it in oatmeal cookies. I would think that putting it in blueberry pie would make me think "there's some weird spice in here that I don't care for". HAHA!

What about ginger? Not much, just enough to give it a little zing.

Why can I imagine that, but not cinnamon--or cassia!

Maybe because cardamom tends more to round out a flavor rather than adding a new top note the way cinnamon does?

When I said I can't imagine it, I meant I can't figure out what it would taste like, not can't imagine someone using it. Writersblock, I don't know, but wouldn't it be easier to imagine a top note? Oh! But those who use cinnamon say it's just a brightener, or something to that effect, so maybe that's the issue? That I can't imagine it underplayed? And the cinnamon toast mind-picture of a top not is too much?

I just made a blueberry pie using a different recipe. It bubbled over a lot. But I did put just a hint of cardamom in it. We'll see. :)

I thinks lemon and blueberries are made for each other. I use lemon juice with almost every blueberry recipe, pancakes, crumbles, pies, etc.

I agree about lemon. I always add lemon juice to my blueberry baked goods - pie, crisp, etc.

I only make pie when I can get fresh wild blueberries, usually only every few years when I'm in Maine.

Cultivated berries have very little taste. Not even cinnamon or lemon juice can save them.

Momj47, I"m sure your wild berries are much better, but the pie I just made with berries from Trader Joe's (i.e., nothing special) was amazingly flavorful. So were the couple of berries I tasted "just to make sure they're not sour", er, ahem, that's my story anyway. I think not all cultivated berries are poor, just the ones that aren't picked ripe, just like so much other fruit.

I've had wild blueberries and I've had cultivated blueberries. I've found that the local berries which I pick myself at the U-pick places taste delicious, and that flavor varies from variety to variety. I usually go from bush to bush tasting until I find the ones I like. The huge ones seem to have less flavor, usually.

Grocery store berries are the bottom of the heap, usually, like the ones I have today which are from Washington. By the time they are picked, packaged, shipped and sold, they aren't optimal. The fresh, locally grown ones, just picked? Oh yeah, a different thing altogether.

I haven't picked yet this year, I'd better get moving or it'll be too late! I have cinnamon for blueberry crisp, lemon for blueberry muffins, no spice at all for pancakes, pies or jam. It's all good.

Annie

I don't doubt it. But the blueberries yesterday, before and after they were in pie, were OMG delicious. Intense blueberry flavor. Just the right amount of sweetness. Not sour or watery. And they were big, so I was surprised, because the big ones are usually just watery. I'm not saying this is the norm for cultivated, nor that wild aren't normally better (though I haven't had enough to compare), but sometimes they're really really good.

I did use juice of a just pick lemon--no a sweet variety. I don't think there was enough cardamom to be perceptible as such. Perhaps it reinforced the lemon as an anti cloying agent. It's a really good pie. :) I used the Stella Parks recipe, substituting the cardamom for the coriander.