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Rhubarb Tart
Cut the large stalks from the leaves, strip off the skin, and divide the fruit into pieces half an inch long. With a pint of these pieces put half a tea-cupful of water, half a tea-cupful of brown sugar, a small pinch of salt, and a quarter of a nutmeg, grated. Stew the fruit gently until it is quite soft, then beat it with a wooden spoon until it is smooth. Line some small dishes or tartlet-pans with pastry, and spread on this a layer of the stewed fruit a little more than a quarter of an inch deep. Roll out some pastry, brush it over with yolk of egg beaten up with a spoonful of milk, and cut it into strips a quarter of an inch wide. Lay these across the tart. Lay a band of pastry round the edge of the dish, trim it evenly, and bake the tart in a well-heated oven. When the pastry loosens from the dish it is done enough. Time to bake, half an hour or more.
A straightforward stewed-rhubarb tartlet from the era when a pint meant a measure of volume for solids as well as liquids. Two things need translating: the cup sizes and the oven.
- A pint of piecesThis is a volume measure of the cut fruit, not a weight. A British pint is 20 fl oz, so roughly 2 1/2 cups of pieces, somewhere around 10-12 oz / 280-340 g of trimmed rhubarb. The recipe does not say how many pans that fills.
- Tea-cupfulA Victorian tea-cup is generally reckoned at about 4 fl oz, so half a tea-cupful is about 2 fl oz, roughly 4 tablespoons. That is still a modest amount of water — rhubarb releases a great deal of its own liquid as it heats.
- SugarAbout 2 fl oz of brown sugar (roughly 1 1/2 to 2 oz by weight) for this quantity of rhubarb is sharp by modern taste, and forced rhubarb, which was sold in the period, is milder than field-grown. Taste the stewed pulp before it cools and add more if wanted; once it is in the pastry there is no correcting it.
- "A well-heated oven"Take this as 400-425F (200-220C). The tarts are small and the pastry needs to set fast; a slack oven gives a pale, greasy crust and a leaking filling.
- Cook the fruit down, not just softThe hinge of the recipe. The pulp must be thick enough to hold a spoon-track before it goes into the pastry, or the moisture will soak the base during the half-hour bake. Stew uncovered and let the liquid reduce.
- The egg washThe recipe glazes the rolled sheet before cutting it into strips, which keeps the wash off the cut edges; it gives no reason for the order. Yolk with a spoonful of milk gives a deep gloss.
- NutmegA quarter of a whole nutmeg grated into 12 oz of fruit is assertive; about half a teaspoon. Scale back to a pinch if you want the rhubarb forward.
- The doneness test"When the pastry loosens from the dish" is reliable for shortcrust in a metal pan — the fat has rendered and the base has crisped and shrunk. Expect 30-35 minutes at that heat.
- The leavesThe recipe's first instruction is to cut the stalks away from the leaves, and that stands. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food; discard them rather than composting them into a stockpot habit.
Rhubarb reached English kitchen gardens as a medicinal root long before anyone ate the stalks — the dried rhizome was a purgative imported from Asia and traded at high prices, and culinary use of the leaf-stalk is generally traced only to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled, forced rhubarb was reaching city markets early in the year — London market gardens had been forcing it for some time, and the large-scale Yorkshire trade with its rail distribution built up over the later decades of the century — making it the first "fruit" of the year in a period when out-of-season produce was scarce, and tarts, fools and puddings absorbed the glut. The recipe's brown sugar and grated nutmeg are of a piece with that: spicing and dark sugar are often said to have suited a sharp, watery stewing fruit, and the lattice-and-band finish described here is simply the domestic tartlet form of the larger open fruit tarts that filled Victorian supper tables.