Stewed Rhubarb
Wash and trim off ends of two pounds tender rhubarb; do not peel. Cut rhubarb in one-inch pieces. Put into baking dish and sprinkle generously with sugar, add just enough water to prevent rhubarb from burning. Cover and bake in oven very slowly until tender but not broken. (Slow cooking preserves its color.) One cup of Sultana raisins may be cooked with rhubarb. They must, however, be first picked over, stems removed, then covered with boiling water, drained, then covered again with boiling water and cooked until soft. Arrange a layer of rhubarb in baking dish, then a sprinkle of raisins and sugar and thus continue until all are used. Finish cooking as directed in the foregoing. Serve very cold. 1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs. 1/2 cup milk.
A baked rather than boiled compote — the whole point is that the pieces hold their shape and their pink colour. Two details in the original need translating, and the four ingredients tacked on at the end belong to a different recipe entirely.
- Oven "very slowly"Period usage for a slow oven varies, but somewhere around 275-300F fits "very slowly." The book gives no time; expect roughly 30 to 45 minutes for two pounds of one-inch pieces, covered, and go by the test of tenderness rather than the clock.
- Do not stirThis is the hinge. Rhubarb collapses into strings the moment it is agitated once hot, and the whole method exists to avoid that. Bake covered, undisturbed, and test by pushing a knife tip into one piece near the edge.
- How much sugar"Sprinkle generously" is the only guidance given. Three-quarters to one cup of granulated sugar per two pounds of rhubarb is the usual range; field rhubarb is sharper than forced hothouse stalks and takes the upper end.
- How much waterVery little — two to three tablespoons for the whole dish. Rhubarb is mostly water and will release plenty of its own; more liquid gives you a thin sauce rather than distinct pieces.
- Do not peel, but do discard the leavesThe instruction not to peel is sound: the skin holds the red colour and the pectin. Rhubarb leaves, however, contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not edible. Trim them off with the ends and throw them away.
- SultanasThe double scalding described was needed for the dried, stem-on fruit of the period. Modern packaged sultanas or golden raisins are soft and clean enough that a single ten-minute soak in boiling water is sufficient.
- The stray ingredient listThe final line, 1/3 cup Cottolene, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup milk, has nothing to do with stewed rhubarb; it appears to be a fragment of another recipe carried over on the page. Cottolene was a branded shortening made from cottonseed oil with beef fat; substitute an equal amount of butter or vegetable shortening if you ever meet it elsewhere.
- Yield and servingThe book gives no yield; two pounds of rhubarb will serve about six as a dessert, more as an accompaniment. "Serve very cold" is meant literally: chill several hours, and the syrup will thicken slightly as it cools.
Rhubarb reaches an American cookbook of this vintage as a spring vegetable used as a fruit — it is the first thing out of the garden after a northern winter. Its old name, pie plant, records exactly how it was mostly eaten. The baked-not-boiled treatment is recommended here on the grounds given in the parenthesis: gentle heat keeps the colour and the shape, where a saucepan on the stove reduces the stalks to fibre in minutes. The sultanas are a period touch, adding sweetness and body at a time when dried fruit was cheap and reliably in the pantry while fresh fruit in April was not. Cottolene, named in the stray line at the end, was a branded cottonseed shortening heavily advertised to American housewives as a cheaper substitute for lard; since it was on sale from the late nineteenth century well into the 1920s, its appearance brackets this book only loosely.