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Date and Rhubarb Pie
Rhubarb cut in small pieces 1 cup sugar 1 cup Dromedary Dates, stoned and chopped Pie paste Cover rhubarb with boiling water and let stand for 10 minutes. Line a pie plate with pastry, and fill up with drained rhubarb, sprinkle over with dates and sugar. Bake with or without an upper crust. Serve hot or cold. If baked without an upper crust spread whipped and sweetened cream over top before serving.
A single-crust or double-crust rhubarb pie sweetened as much by dates as by sugar. The original gives no oven temperature, no baking time, and no quantity of rhubarb, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- How much rhubarbThe ingredient list leaves the amount blank. About 4 cups of trimmed rhubarb cut in half-inch pieces (roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb) fills a 9-inch plate and balances the cup each of sugar and dates.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given. Bake as you would any juicy fruit pie: 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the filling bubbles thickly at the edge.
- The boiling-water step is the hingeCovering the cut rhubarb with boiling water for 10 minutes and then draining it well is what keeps this pie from flooding. Rhubarb is mostly water and there is no flour or cornstarch anywhere in the recipe; skip the draining and you get soup under the crust.
- Dromedary DatesA brand name, still sold. Any pitted dates work; "stoned" simply means pitted. Chop them small so they distribute rather than sinking into a single sticky layer.
- SweetnessOne cup of sugar plus a cup of dates reads sweet by modern taste for a fruit that has already been blanched. Three-quarters of a cup of sugar is enough if your rhubarb is young and pink.
- Pie pasteThe book assumes you have a pastry recipe elsewhere; a standard all-butter or lard short crust is right. For a top crust, cut vents, as the filling steams heavily.
- The whipped cream finishOn the single-crust version, add the sweetened cream only after the pie has cooled, or it will slump immediately.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Dromedary was the date brand of Hills Brothers of New York, and booklets like this one existed to find as many uses as possible for packaged dates once they were sold pitted in cartons rather than loose in the bulk trade. Pairing dates with rhubarb solves a practical problem: rhubarb is one of the first things out of a northern kitchen garden in spring and it is fiercely sour, so it is commonly matched with something that carries sugar, whether that is strawberries, raisins, or in this case a fruit that a grocery-store shopper could now buy in a carton year round. The recipe leaves the upper crust optional and offers whipped cream as the finish for the open version.