Instructions: Blend the water, sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon together in the skillet and stir in the blueberries. Bring to a gentle boil over low heat.

While the blueberries are heating, blend the dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl. Rub in the butter with your fingertips. Quickly stir in the buttermilk.

Drop the biscuit dough in blobs over the blueberry mixture. Cover and cook over low heat until the biscuit dough is done, about 15 minutes.

Serve with blueberries spooned over the biscuits.

NOTES : This is one of those desserts from our childhood whose name used to send us into gales of laughter. In fact there may have been a certain amount of chuckling going on when it was first christened. First you need to picture how it was put together and cooked.

First you take a quart of blueberries (Cape Cod aside, wild blueberries grow in profusion on low, scrubby bushes scattered over rather barren land in Maine and all over the Northeast; the tiny tart ones from Maine are by far the most famous.)... preferably, tart Maine blueberries, stir in some sugar and water and put them in an iron spider (a cast iron skillet) or casserole dish that can sit on a burner. (Grunts used to be cooked in an open cast iron Dutch oven over the coals of a fire.) Then you top the berries with blobs of biscuit dough and let it cook very slowly.

As the concoction begins to heat, bubbles slowly work their way up from the bottom of the pot to break through the biscuit dough topping. The small snufflings you hear from the pot on top of the stove today probably sounded like a significant grunting of pigs in the huge cast iron pots that were used 300 years ago.

At any rate, the grunt may look just like fruit with dumplings to you, which it is; it is also essentially the same as the slump; and is presumably the antecedent of the cobbler and the dowdy. The latter contain essentially the same ingredients as the grunt and slump but rather than being steamed, they are baked to a golden brown in that more modern device, the oven. The cobbler is served as is; the crust of the dowdy is "dowdied," or broken up and mixed into the fruit and cooked further.

If you would like to email yourself the recipe for later use, or share the recipe with your friends or family, enter the email addresses below and this recipe will be emailed to you and others as well.