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Rhubarb Custard Pie
1 cupful cut rhubarb 1 cupful sugar 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful ginger extract 1 cupful milk Crisco pastry Cut rhubarb in small pieces and mix with sugar and flour. Beat egg yolks, add milk, ginger extract, and melted Crisco. Line pie plate with pastry, and fill with rhubarb mixture. Pour custard over and bake in moderate oven until firm. Cover with meringue made with stiffly beaten whites of eggs to which two tablespoonfuls powdered sugar have been added.
Sufficient for one small pie.
A shallow rhubarb custard in a single crust, from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks. The instructions assume a cook who knows when a custard is set; the rest is straightforward.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Expect 40 to 50 minutes for the custard to set — the center should still wobble slightly when the pie is moved, since it firms as it cools. A hotter oven curdles the egg and weeps liquid into the pastry.
- Only the stalksUse the pink and green stalks alone. Rhubarb leaves contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely poisonous and must be cut away and discarded, along with any leaf base still attached.
- CriscoThe 1 tablespoon of melted Crisco in the custard is there because the book was published to sell it. Melted butter gives a better flavor; any neutral oil works. Modern shortening is no longer the same product — the 1910s formulation was partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil.
- Ginger extractGinger extract is now hard to find outside baking-supply shops. Substitute 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, or a teaspoon of finely grated fresh ginger, both of which read stronger than the extract did.
- The flour is doing real workOne tablespoon is not much thickener, but rhubarb throws off a great deal of juice. Toss the cut fruit with the sugar and flour and let it sit while you make the custard, so the flour hydrates rather than sitting in dry pockets.
- MeringueTwo tablespoons of powdered sugar for two whites is a very lean meringue by current standards and will shrink and bead. Beat the whites to soft peaks first, add the sugar gradually, and spread the meringue so it touches the crust all around. Return to the 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes to color.
- Yield"One small pie" most likely means an 8-inch plate, though the book does not say; figure about six modest slices. Doubling for a 9-inch deep dish would want a longer bake, perhaps closer to an hour.
- ServingCool completely before cutting. A warm rhubarb custard slumps on the plate; several hours at room temperature, or an hour in the refrigerator, lets it slice cleanly.
This comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of a series of cookbooks written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the years after Crisco went on sale in 1911 — which is why shortening appears not only in the pastry but stirred into the custard, where fat is barely needed. Rhubarb itself was a spring staple in American kitchens long before it reached this book: hardy, perennial, and ready weeks before any other fruit, and it was widely known as pieplant, pie being a common destination for it. Pairing it with a baked custard, rather than a second crust, stretches a single cupful of fruit into a full dessert — a habit of thrift the promotional cookbooks were happy to encourage, so long as the thrift ran through a can of Crisco.