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Rhubarb Turnovers
Make a little good pastry, and roll it out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Stamp it out in rounds from four to six inches in diameter, and lay upon one-half of the pastry a little young rhubarb cut small or a little stewed rhubarb. Add sugar to taste, and sprinkle a little powdered ginger over the fruit. Turn the pastry over, pinch the edges closely together, and brush the turnovers with white of egg. Sprinkle a little powdered white sugar over them, and bake on tins in a brisk oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. each.
A plain fruit turnover that depends almost entirely on getting the pastry hot fast and keeping the filling from flooding out. Everything else is a matter of proportion.
- Brisk oven"Brisk" is generally taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C). The twenty minutes quoted assumes that sort of heat; much cooler and the pastry is likely to slump and take up juice before the crust sets.
- Good pastryCassell's "good pastry" is unspecified here; a short crust of roughly 8 oz flour to 4-5 oz butter or lard, with just enough ice water to bind, suits the job. Quarter-inch is thicker than most modern pastry work, presumably because it has to hold wet fruit.
- Sugar, not to tasteRhubarb needs more than the phrase suggests. Reckon on 1 to 2 tsp per turnover for raw fruit, tossed with the pieces beforehand rather than dropped on top, so the acid is buffered evenly.
- Raw versus stewed fillingRaw young rhubarb cut small will cook through in twenty minutes but throws a great deal of liquid. Stewed rhubarb, drained well and cooled, gives a far more reliable seal; if using it, drain it properly or the base will be sodden.
- SealingEgg white on the inner rim of the pastry before folding, not just on top, is what keeps the syrup in. Pinch, then crimp with a fork, and leave a half-inch clear border free of fruit.
- LeavesOnly the stalks are used. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are never eaten; trim and discard them.
- GingerA pinch of ground ginger per turnover is plenty. Ginger was a common Victorian partner to rhubarb, doing the work cinnamon or orange zest might do now.
- YieldAn 8 oz-flour batch of pastry gives roughly six turnovers at four inches, and proportionately fewer at six. Cool them on a rack for at least ten minutes; the filling is very hot straight from the oven.
Rhubarb arrived in British kitchens as a medicine long before it was a pudding: the dried root was imported for its purgative properties, and the stalks were only widely eaten as fruit from the early nineteenth century, once forcing and improved varieties made them tender and less stringy. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the 1870s and after, rhubarb was often said to be among the cheapest of spring fruits in England, the first thing in the garden after a bare winter, which is why the costing of a penny each is worth noticing - this is a recipe about thrift as much as flavour. The turnover itself is older than the filling; a folded round of pastry baked flat on a tin was standard for anything a cook wanted to send out portable, from apple to mincemeat, and it is generally regarded as a forerunner of the shop-bought hand pie. The powdered ginger is traditionally explained as a corrective to rhubarb's sharpness, a habit carried over from the days when the plant was considered more drug than dessert.