Home › Pies of All Kinds › Rhubarb-Date Pie
Rhubarb-Date Pie
Line a pie tin with rich paste, and lay on this a layer of stoned dates. Fill up with stewed rhubarb, and bake with an upper crust.
Three lines of instruction assume a cook who already knows how a two-crust fruit pie behaves. The gaps worth filling are the sweetening, the moisture, and the oven.
- "Rich paste"Period shorthand for a short pastry made with a high proportion of fat to flour o 2 parts flour, 1 part butter or lard, ice water to bind. Enough for a double crust on a 9-inch tin.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for 30-40 minutes until the top is coloured and the filling bubbles at the vents.
- Stewed rhubarb, not rawThe rhubarb goes in already cooked. The recipe does not say whether it was sweetened, but a period cook would almost certainly have sugared it in the stewing: rhubarb stewed plain is fiercely sour, and the dates alone will not carry the pie. Figure 1 to 1 1/4 cups sugar per pound of rhubarb, adjusted down because the dates add their own.
- The hinge: drain itStewed rhubarb throws an enormous amount of liquid, and a wet filling on an unbaked bottom crust gives a soaked base. Drain the fruit well, or thicken the filling with a tablespoon or two of flour or cornstarch before it goes in.
- Stoned datesPitted dates. Deglet Noor are firm enough to hold their shape as a layer; Medjool will melt into the rhubarb, which is not a fault but changes the texture. The layer at the bottom also acts as a partial barrier against the rhubarb juice.
- Vent the topNo mention of slits, but a sealed upper crust over wet fruit will lift and split where it chooses. Cut vents, and set the tin on a baking sheet.
- Rhubarb leavesUse only the stalks. The leaf blades contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food; trim and discard them.
- YieldThe recipe gives no tin size; on a 9-inch tin, six to eight servings. Best eaten the day it is made.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, to sell Five Roses flour, and it was distributed very widely to Canadian households. Rhubarb belongs squarely to that readership: hardy enough to survive prairie and Maritime winters, it came up in spring when nothing else in the garden had, and North American cooks called it pie plant for the obvious reason. Pairing it with dates is the interesting move here -- dates arrived through the dried-fruit trade and kept well in the pantry, so a cook could reach for sweetness and body in the early spring, months before any local fruit was ripe.