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Pie-Plant Butter
Allow one pound of sugar to each pound of peeled and cut up rhubarb; let the rhubarb and sugar simmer gently for an hour, or more if the rhubarb is old and tough. This is a nice preserve, and children should be encouraged to eat it during the winter.
A two-ingredient preserve of the simplest kind: equal weights of rhubarb and sugar, cooked down until thick. The only real decisions are how long to cook it and how to keep it.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name was standard American usage through the nineteenth century, taken from the stalk's chief use in pies. Buy stalks that are firm and squeaky; limp ones will collapse to water and sugar.
- Leaves are not optional to removeRhubarb leaf blades contain oxalic acid and related compounds at levels high enough to cause harm, and are never eaten. Trim them off along with any tough bit of the crown end and discard them.
- PeelingThe instruction assumes thick, stringy, field-grown stalks. Modern hothouse and early-summer rhubarb is thin-skinned; peeling only loses colour. Peel only if the stalk is coarse and fibrous, which is also the case in which the recipe tells you to cook it longer.
- Equal weights, by weightA pound of sugar to a pound of trimmed rhubarb is roughly 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar to about 4 cups chopped stalks. Rhubarb is very acidic and very wet, so this ratio is doing preservation work as well as sweetening; cutting the sugar substantially gives a sauce, not a butter.
- Start it slowly, then stirToss the cut rhubarb with the sugar and leave it an hour before heating, so the sugar draws out enough juice to keep things from catching. Once it thickens in the second half of the cooking it will scorch quickly on a modern flat-bottomed pan over direct heat; low flame and frequent stirring.
- How to know it is doneAn hour is a guide, not a rule. The butter is ready when a spoon drawn across the pan bottom leaves a track that closes slowly, around 218-220F on a thermometer. It will thicken further as it cools.
- Yield and keepingA pound of each gives roughly two cups. The book offers no processing instructions, sealed crocks and jars being the period's usual method. Refrigerate it and use within a few weeks, or freeze it; if you want the shelf-stable winter supply the recipe imagines, follow a current tested water-bath canning procedure for rhubarb preserves.
Rhubarb was among the first things a northern kitchen garden produced in spring, often weeks ahead of anything else, and nineteenth-century American cooks called it pie-plant, after the use they put it to, treating it as a fruit despite its being a stalk. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Ohio in 1877 and reprinted for decades, was written for households that preserved because they had to: a glut in May had to be turned into something that would last until the following spring. The closing line about encouraging children to eat it in winter reads as nutrition rather than sentiment, tart preserved fruit often being thought of as a corrective to a winter diet of salt meat, potatoes and bread. "Butter" here means only the texture of a long-cooked fruit paste smooth enough to spread, the same sense as in apple butter; no dairy is involved.