Rhubarb Tarts
If rhubarb is pink, young and tender, simply wash and cut in one-half inch pieces; there should be two and one-half cups. Cover with boiling water and heat to boiling point; boil five minutes. Do not allow it to lose its shape. Drain off all the juice, sprinkle rhubarb with three-fourths cup sugar. Sift over two tablespoons flour and one-fourth teaspoon salt, dot over with one tablespoon butter and a grating of orange rind. Mix well and turn into a pie pan lined with Rich Paste. Arrange strips of pastry, latticework fashion, across the top of pie and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
A single-crust lattice pie, called a tart in the older English sense. The blanch-and-drain step is what separates it from a modern rhubarb pie, and it is the part worth understanding.
- Drain the juice, and mean itBoiling the rhubarb for five minutes and pouring off every drop of liquid is the hinge of the recipe. It is why only two tablespoons of flour are needed to thicken; skip the draining and the filling will flood the crust.
- Five minutes is the limitYoung pink stalks collapse fast. Start timing when the water returns to the boil and pull the pan the moment the pieces are tender but still square-edged, as the original warns.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. If the bottom crust worries you, bake on a preheated sheet or stone on the lowest rack; the filling is already cooked, so the thirty minutes is really about setting the pastry.
- Rich PasteThe book's own pastry recipe, given elsewhere. Any short single-crust recipe with enough dough left over for a lattice will do.
- QuantitiesTwo and a half cups of half-inch pieces is roughly 10-12 oz / 300-340 g of trimmed stalks. Three-quarters cup sugar is on the restrained side for rhubarb that has had its juice discarded; taste the drained fruit before committing.
- LeavesRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and are not eaten. Trim them off and discard, along with any part of the stalk that is limp or browned.
- The drained juiceDo not throw it out. Sweetened and chilled it makes a pink cordial, or reduce it to a syrup for spooning over the finished slices.
- YieldOne pie, six to eight slices, depending on pan size. Cool at least an hour before cutting so the flour-set filling holds its shape.
Rhubarb was grown in Britain and America as a medicinal plant long before it was eaten as fruit; its rise as a pie filling followed the spread of cheap sugar in the nineteenth century, since the stalks are inedibly sour without it. Its old American nickname, pie plant, tells you what it was chiefly for. Forced and early field rhubarb is the first thing resembling fruit to reach a northern kitchen after winter, months before berries. The pairing with orange rind draws on the other thing available in late winter, imported citrus, which was reaching American markets from Florida and California by rail around the turn of the century.