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Canned Pie-Plant
Cut the pie-plant, wash and prepare it as you would to make a pie, then put it in a glass can, fill with cold water and seal tight, as we do ordinary canned fruit; this new method, strange as it may seem, is a perfect success. If you want a delicious pie in January, this will make it in the ordinary way of making a pieplant pie. One cup sugar (add with pie-plant,) one tablespoon melted butter, and nutmeg to taste.
The pie filling at the end is straightforward; the canning method is not. Cold-water canning of rhubarb was a widespread nineteenth-century household practice, and it is exactly the kind of unprocessed home preserving that no current guidance supports.
- Why the canning failsThere is no heat step anywhere: no scalded jars, no boiling-water bath, no processing time, no temperature. Nothing kills the mold spores, yeasts and bacteria already on the stalks and on the jar rim, and nothing drives out air to form a vacuum, so there is no reliable way to tell later whether the seal ever held.
- Acidity is not a licenceRhubarb is genuinely high-acid, which is why this method appeared to work often enough to be recommended. But surface molds growing in an unprocessed jar consume acid and raise the pH of their surroundings, which can open the door to organisms the acidity was supposed to exclude. A jar meant to sit until January has months for that to happen.
- The vesselA "glass can" is a mason-type jar, most often sealed in this period with a zinc lid over a rubber ring, though other closures were in use. Such rings perished with age and heat, and the original gives no headspace, no jar size and no way to check the seal — three of the things a tested recipe exists to specify. Use a current, tested rhubarb recipe instead if you want to put up stalks for winter.
- Leaves"Prepare it as you would to make a pie" assumes the reader knows to use only the stalks. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds and are not food; trim and discard them.
- Pie-plantPie-plant is rhubarb; the name reflects the plant's principal use in American kitchens, in pies.
- The filling proportionsOne cup sugar, one tablespoon melted butter and grated nutmeg is about what a single standard pie would take, though the recipe never states how much rhubarb it means. Fresh rhubarb releases a great deal of liquid, so a modern cook would ordinarily add a thickener — flour or cornstarch — which this recipe omits entirely.
"Pie-plant" was the ordinary American name for rhubarb through most of the nineteenth century; the plant spread through kitchen gardens in the eastern states in the early 1800s, valued because it was hardy, perennial and ready weeks before any tree fruit, which made it the first pie of the year in many households. Cold-water canning of rhubarb — raw stalks, a jar, plain water, no heat at all — circulated in farm papers and community cookbooks of the period, often presented much as it is here, as a surprising new method that readers were assured really worked. It seems to have survived on the strength of rhubarb's unusual acidity.