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Pie-Plant Jelly
Wash the stalks well, cut into pieces an inch long, put them into a preserving-kettle with enough water to cover them, and boil to a soft pulp; strain through a jelly-bag. To each pint of this juice add a pound of loaf-sugar; boil again, skimming often, and when it jellies on the skimmer remove it from the fire and put into jars.
Pie-plant is rhubarb, and this is a straightforward strained-juice jelly. The difficulty is that rhubarb is low in pectin, so the set depends entirely on how far you take the boil.
- Pie-plantThe nineteenth-century American name for rhubarb, reflecting its familiar use in pies. Use the stalks only; the leaves are high in oxalic acid and are discarded, as the recipe's "wash the stalks" quietly assumes.
- Loaf-sugarRefined white sugar, sold in hard cones or loaves and broken up as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent, weight for weight.
- The proportionA pound of sugar to a pint of juice is about 2¼ cups sugar to 2 cups juice, or near enough equal weights of sugar and juice, which is close to standard jelly proportions. Expect a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm one.
- The set"Jellies on the skimmer" is the sheet test: the last of the syrup runs off the edge in a single curtain instead of separate drops. That corresponds to about 220F at sea level, and a thermometer is more reliable than the eye. Rhubarb may never sheet properly on its own; commercial pectin, or a portion of underripe apple juice added at the first boil, is the usual remedy.
- The kettleA preserving-kettle is a wide, heavy pan; period ones were often brass or copper. Stainless steel or enamel is the safe modern choice, as acidic fruit can pick up metallic flavours from bare aluminium or iron.
- StrainingLet the pulp drip through the jelly-bag unaided. Squeezing forces fine solids through and gives cloudy jelly.
- SkimmingThe foam is protein and air, not impurity, but it clouds the finished jelly and should come off as it rises. A knob of butter stirred in near the end will knock most of it down.
- Filling the jarsThe recipe gives no sealing instruction beyond "put into jars." For keeping at room temperature, process filled jars in a boiling-water bath following current guidance; otherwise refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldJuice yield depends on how much water is added and how far the pulp is strained; a pint of juice with a pound of sugar boils down to roughly two half-pint jars.
Rhubarb went by "pie-plant" through most of the nineteenth century in the United States, a name that tells you exactly what households did with it. Its arrival in American gardens is generally traced to the late eighteenth century, and by the time Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s it was a fixture of the kitchen plot: the first thing to come up in spring, weeks ahead of any real fruit, and treated as a fruit accordingly. That seasonal position explains why it turns up in the jellies and jams chapter at all. A cook who had run down the last of the previous year's preserves could make something sweet again in April from a plant that needed no tending, and the heavy hand with sugar here is doing double duty — correcting rhubarb's sourness and preserving it.