Pie-Plant Pie
Mix half tea-cup white sugar and one heaping tea-spoon flour together, sprinkle over the bottom crust, then add the pie-plant cut up fine; sprinkle over this another half tea-cup sugar and heaping tea-spoon flour; bake fully three-quarters of an hour in a slow oven. Or, stew the pie-plant, sweeten, add grated rind and juice of a lemon and yolks of two eggs, and bake and frost like lemon pie. - Mrs. D. Buxton.
A plain rhubarb pie from the era when the plant was grown for pies and called nothing else. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name reflects its near-single use in nineteenth-century American kitchens. Use the stalks only, trimmed and cut into pieces about half an inch — "cut up fine" here means small dice, not shredded.
- The leaves are not foodRhubarb leaf blades contain oxalic acid and related compounds in quantities that cause poisoning. Cut them off at the top of the stalk and discard them; the recipe assumes you already have.
- Tea-cup measureA tea-cup in books of this period generally runs smaller than a modern measuring cup; somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of a cup is the usual reckoning, so "half a tea-cup" is roughly a third of a cup and the two sprinklings together give something under three-quarters of a cup of sugar. The recipe never says how much pie-plant to use, so judge by eye: taste your stalks and add more sugar if they are very sour.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is usually translated as somewhere around 300-325F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat cooks the fruit through but can leave a bottom crust pale; a modern alternative is to start hot, around 425F for the first fifteen minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 325F for the remainder.
- The flour is the thickenerTwo heaping teaspoons of flour is a light hand for rhubarb, which throws a great deal of juice. Splitting it between the bottom of the shell and the top of the fruit is deliberate — the lower layer protects the crust from the syrup as it forms.
- The crustNo top is specified, though the phrase "bottom crust" suggests another was assumed. If you use one, cut vents, or use lattice, and set the pie on a sheet pan; rhubarb pies boil over.
- The second versionThe alternative is closer to a custard: stewed sweetened rhubarb with lemon and two egg yolks, baked in a single shell. "Frost like lemon pie" most likely means a meringue of the leftover whites, briefly browned, though the recipe does not say so. Bake it moderately -- around 350F is a reasonable modern setting -- and look for a filling that barely trembles at the centre.
- YieldOne pie; nine inches is a reasonable modern size, giving six to eight servings.
"Pie-plant" was the ordinary American name for rhubarb through most of the nineteenth century, and the plant earned it: it is generally said to have come into Western gardens as a medicinal root and to have been adopted in Britain and then America as a sweetened dessert fruit once cheap sugar made the stalks palatable. It was prized less for flavour than for timing April May, weeks before any tree fruit or berry, and in a household eating from the cellar all winter a fresh pie in spring counted for something. Buckeye Cookery, credited to Estelle Woods Wilcox and begun in Ohio, is full of such credited recipes; Mrs. D. Buxton's two versions show the standard division of the period between a plain fruit pie and a "lemon pie" treatment, meaning a thickened custard under meringue.