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Rhubarb Conserve
3½ pounds rhubarb 3 pounds sugar Grated rind and juice 2 lemons pound blanched almonds pound candied orange peel Chop the rhubarb fine, add the sugar, lemon juice, and rind, and set to cook. When the sugar is melted and the mixture is boiling throughout, add the almonds, - chopped fine, and the peel shredded very fine, and let cook about thirty minutes. Store as jelly.
Rhubarb Conserve No. 2 8 cups sugar 3 pints rhubarb in bits 2 oranges, grated, rind and juice pound raisins, seeded 1 cup blanched almonds, sliced a cup water Cook the ingredients save the nuts twenty minutes; add the nuts, and boil five minutes.
Two versions of the same idea: rhubarb boiled down with sugar and citrus, then enriched with nuts and dried fruit. The text has come through with several fractions lost, so read the quantities carefully before shopping.
- The missing fractionsIn No. 1, "pound blanched almonds" and "pound candied orange peel" have plainly lost their fractions, as have No. 2's "pound raisins" and "a cup water"; what the original figures were cannot be recovered from this text. A full pound of almonds against 3½ pounds of fruit would overwhelm the conserve, so treat ¼ to ½ pound as the sensible range and use judgement.
- Trim the leavesRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantities high enough to be genuinely poisonous and must be cut off and discarded. Only the stalks go into the pot, which the period cook took for granted.
- Conserve versus jamA conserve is a preserve carrying nuts, dried fruit or citrus peel through it. The nuts go in late in both versions for a reason: prolonged boiling turns almonds soft and greyish and dulls their flavour.
- The hinge is the set pointNeither version gives a test, but thirty minutes is a guide, not a rule. Cook to 220F on a candy thermometer at sea level, or until a spoonful on a chilled saucer wrinkles when nudged. Rhubarb is high in acid but low in pectin, so expect a soft set carried mostly by the heavy sugar and the long boil; the almonds and peel make it easy to mistake thickness for doneness.
- Stir and watch the bottomRhubarb breaks down fast and this is a heavy sugar mixture in a wide pan. Once the fruit collapses it will scorch quickly; a heavy-bottomed preserving pan and steady stirring in the last ten minutes matter more than the exact time.
- "Store as jelly"In this period that meant pouring hot into sterilised glasses and sealing with melted paraffin. Current practice is hot jars, ¼-inch headspace, two-piece lids, and ten minutes in a boiling-water bath, adjusted for altitude.
- Candied orange peelCommercial candied peel today is usually diced and sugar-crusted rather than the whole candied strips the recipe assumes. Shred it as finely as you can; a coarse dice stays in obtrusive chunks.
- YieldNo. 1 makes roughly six to seven half-pint jars, No. 2 slightly more. Three pints of rhubarb in bits is about 1½ pounds trimmed.
Rhubarb was the first thing the northern kitchen garden gave up in spring, weeks ahead of any berry, which is why preserving manuals of this period are thick with ways to use it. Cheap, abundant and sour, it took sugar well and needed help with flavour, hence the lemon, orange, raisins and almonds here: the additions are doing the work that the fruit cannot do alone. The word conserve, as against jam or marmalade, generally signalled exactly this kind of mixture, a fruit preserve carrying nuts and dried fruit. Rhubarb's other common nickname, pie plant, is nineteenth-century American usage, earlier than this recipe, and tells you where most of the crop otherwise went.