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Stewed Pie-Plant
Make a rich syrup by adding sugar to water in which long strips of orange peel have been boiled until tender, lay into it a single layer of pieces of pie-plant three inches long, and stew gently until clear. When done remove and cook another layer. This makes a handsome dessert-dish, ornamented with puff-paste cut in fanciful shapes. Use one orange to two and a half pounds pie-plant.
A poaching method rather than a stew in any modern sense: the rhubarb is cooked a layer at a time in an orange-scented syrup so the pieces stay whole. The original assumes you know how sweet to make the syrup and how much of it to make.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name was standard in nineteenth-century American books because the plant's overwhelming use was pie filling. Two and a half pounds is roughly 8-9 medium stalks, trimmed.
- Use stalks onlyRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantities high enough to be poisonous and should be cut off and discarded. Anything green and leafy at the top goes; the stalk itself is the food.
- The syrup is unspecifiedNo ratio is given. "Rich syrup" in period usage means a heavy one -- at least equal parts sugar and water, often more -- simmered until the sugar has dissolved. Rhubarb is sharp, so the syrup should taste distinctly too sweet on its own.
- Orange peelPare the zest in strips with a peeler and leave the white pith behind; pith boiled in syrup turns it bitter. Boil the strips in the water until tender before the sugar goes in, as sugar toughens peel.
- Why a single layerThis is the hinge. Rhubarb collapses into threads the moment it is crowded or stirred. One layer, barely covered, at a bare simmer with no agitation, and lift each piece out with a slotted spoon before starting the next.
- "Stew gently until clear"Clear means translucent, not soft. Expect 4-8 minutes depending on thickness — far less than the word "stew" suggests. Test at 4 minutes and pull the pieces while they still hold their shape.
- Puff-paste garnishBought all-butter puff pastry, cut into diamonds or crescents and baked at 400F until risen and dry, does the job. Bake it separately and set it around the fruit at the last moment so it does not go soft.
- Yield and servingServes 6-8. Reduce the remaining syrup a little and spoon it over; serve cold or barely warm, with cream if you like.
"Pie-plant" was the ordinary American name for rhubarb through most of the nineteenth century -- botanically a vegetable, it was treated as fruit because it arrived in late spring, weeks before anything from the orchard, and because it was almost never eaten without a great deal of sugar. That sugar is the point of the entry. Buckeye Cookery circulated in editions from the later 1870s, including one published in Minneapolis, for households that still put up their own preserves, and a recipe that poaches rhubarb whole in syrup rather than boiling it into sauce is a company dish: it consumes sugar freely, uses an orange for scent alone, and finishes with puff paste cut into shapes. The instruction to cook one layer at a time is the sort of detail that separates a book written by working cooks from one written by editors.