Rhubarb Pie
2 cups rhubarb. 3/4 cup sugar. 1 egg slightly beaten. 2 tablespoons flour.
Few grains salt.
Few grains nutmeg.
PROCESS: If rhubarb is young and tender it need not be peeled. Cut the stalks in half-inch pieces before measuring. Mix sugar, flour, egg, salt and nutmeg. Add to rhubarb, toss together until ingredients are well mixed. Turn into a pie pan lined with paste, heap rhubarb well in center, cover with a top crust and bake thirtyfive minutes in a hot oven. (When rhubarb is older it may be scalded before using.)
The printed ingredient list on this page is partial — the quantities of rhubarb and sugar belong to a line that did not survive the page break, so the amounts have to be supplied from practice.
- Missing quantitiesThe egg, flour, salt and nutmeg are given, but not the rhubarb or the sugar. For a 9-inch double-crust pie, figure on about 4 cups of cut rhubarb and 1 to 1 1/4 cups of sugar; the single egg and 2 tablespoons of flour are sized for roughly that much fruit.
- A hot ovenRead this as roughly 400–450F. Thirty-five minutes at that heat may brown the crust before a heaped pie is cooked through; one workable approach is to start at 425F for 15 minutes and drop to 375F for another 30 to 40, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Leaves are not foodRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are never eaten. Trim them off and discard them, along with any dried-out leaf base at the top of the stalk. The stalks themselves are entirely safe.
- Cut before measuringCutting first matters: half-inch pieces measured loose in a cup give a more consistent amount of fruit than whole stalks. Weigh if you prefer: roughly 1 1/4 lb trimmed stalks fills a 9-inch pie.
- The thickening is lightTwo tablespoons of flour plus an egg is a modest set, and rhubarb throws a lot of liquid. Letting the sugared fruit stand 15 minutes and stirring it again before filling helps, but expect a loose, spoonable pie rather than a sliceable one. An extra tablespoon of flour is defensible with very juicy spring rhubarb.
- Scalding older stalksPouring boiling water over coarse late-season stalks and draining them softens the fibre, as the parenthetical allows. Drain thoroughly, or the extra water will thin the filling further.
- Protect the oven floorHeaping the fruit in the center, as directed, means the pie will run. Bake on a rimmed sheet.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Best eaten the day it is made, while the bottom crust is still crisp.
Rhubarb was the first thing worth putting in a pie after a long winter, and in nineteenth-century American gardens it was widely known as pie plant, a name that says plainly what it was grown for — the stalks are too sour to eat out of hand and needed the sugar and the crust to make sense. The egg here is doing something more than binding: beaten into the sugar and flour, it sets into a thin custard among the fruit, a treatment found in period rhubarb pies that softens the acid edge. The nutmeg is often said to be the older habit, from a time when a grating of it went into a great many sweet dishes as a matter of course, though the order in which nutmeg gave way to cinnamon as the default American pie spice is less certain than it is usually made to sound.