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Rhubarb Pie
2 cups rhubarb (stewed) 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons Five Roses flour 1 egg Bake with 2 crusts.
A four-line pie formula of the kind that assumes you already know how to line a plate and crimp an edge. The proportions are sound; almost everything else has to be supplied from experience.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose cookbook this is. Any all-purpose flour works here — two tablespoons is simply the thickener for the juice.
- Stewed rhubarbThe rhubarb is cooked before it goes in, which is why the filling needs so little thickening. If your stewed rhubarb is loose and watery, drain some liquid off or the bottom crust will not set.
- Never the leavesRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. Use stalks only, trimmed of every trace of leaf — something the original assumed without saying.
- The eggOne whole egg, presumably beaten and stirred into the sweetened fruit. It helps bind the filling so that it slices rather than pools, though one egg to two cups of fruit gives only a light set, not a custard.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. As a modern starting point, a double-crust fruit pie can be started hot to set the bottom crust -- about 425F for the first 15 minutes -- then finished at 350F for a further 30 to 35 minutes, until the crust is browned and the filling barely trembles at the centre.
- SugarA full cup to two cups of fruit is right for field rhubarb, which is fiercely sour. Forced hothouse rhubarb is milder; three-quarters of a cup is usually enough.
- : Two rounds of short pastry, the top vented. Cut the steam slits generously; a sealed top over a wet filling will lift and split.Crusts -- Two rounds of short pastry, the top well vented; the recipe gives no plate size. Cut the steam slits generously -- a sealed lid over this much juice will lift and split.
- YieldOne pie; the recipe gives no plate size, and two cups of filling suits a modest one. Let it cool well before cutting or the filling will run.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it circulated very widely in Canadian farm kitchens through the 1910s and 1920s -- it is often said to have been the only cookbook in many households. Rhubarb earned its place in such a book by timing: it is the first thing to come up in a cold-climate garden, weeks before any tree fruit or berry. It is often called pieplant in North American cookery of the period, a name that refers to the plant's use rather than to any botanical fact, and it turns up in nineteenth-century seed catalogues and cookbooks alike. The addition of an egg to bind the filling is consistent with the era's economy: it stretches a small quantity of stewed fruit into a full pie and helps keep the juice from soaking the crust, as in the custard and vinegar pies of the period.