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Baked Pie-Plant
Cut in pieces about an inch long, put in baking-dish in layers with an equal weight of sugar, cover closely and bake.
Pie-plant is rhubarb, and this is about as spare as a recipe gets: fruit, sugar, a covered dish, heat. A few numbers fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- Pie-plantAn old American name for rhubarb, from its long-standing use as a pie filling. Only the stalks are eaten; the leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are always cut off and discarded before cooking.
- Equal weight of sugarA pound of sugar to a pound of rhubarb is far sweeter than modern taste allows. Modern recipes generally use a quarter to a third of the fruit's weight — roughly 4 to 6 oz of sugar per pound of stalks — and taste before adding more.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits this; a hotter oven risks collapsing the pieces before the sugar has drawn out the juice.
- Cover closelyThis is the hinge. Rhubarb releases a great deal of liquid, and a tight lid or foil traps the steam so the pieces poach in their own syrup rather than drying at the edges. No added water is needed.
- TimingInch pieces in a covered dish take about 30 to 40 minutes. Pull them while they still hold their shape — a few minutes past that and you have sauce, which is fine but is a different dish.
- VesselUse glass, stoneware or enamelled cast iron. Rhubarb is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined iron.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of stalks serves four to six, warm or cold, with cream, custard, or alongside cold roast pork or duck.
Rhubarb was established in American kitchen gardens and spread fast, largely because it was the first thing in the garden fit to eat — the stalks come up while the fruit trees are still bare, and its use in pies gave it the affectionate name of the pieplant and a place at the front of every spring dessert list. Buckeye Cookery, a compilation generally associated with Ohio and appearing in an 1877 edition reprinted through the 1880s, files it under Fruits although rhubarb is botanically a vegetable, a classification that market practice and tariff rules are said to have argued over since. The baked treatment here, as opposed to stewing on the stove, needed no watching, no stirring, and no water.