Pie Plant Pie
3 cups pie plant diced 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon butter.
Wash the pie plant, do not skin; cut in small pieces. Mix sugar and flour, put half on the lower crust of pastry, add the pie plant, pour over the remaining half of sugar, dot with butter and cover with upper crust. Bake from forty to forty-five minutes.
A plain two-crust rhubarb pie with a very short ingredient list; the original assumes you know your own oven and your own pastry.
- Pie plant is rhubarbThe name was standard in American cookbooks well into the 20th century, and is generally taken to reflect the plant's overwhelmingly common use in pies. Use the stalks only; the leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are always discarded.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A double-crust fruit pie is usually started hot, around 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then dropped to about 350F. Judge by the crust and by bubbling juice rather than by the clock; forty to forty-five minutes may not be enough.
- "Do not skin"Deliberate instruction, not an oversight. The red skin carries most of the colour, and young spring stalks are tender enough to need no peeling. Thick late-season stalks with stringy edges are worth trimming.
- The flour is the hingeOne tablespoon for three cups of fruit is very little thickener by modern standards, and older recipes tolerated a looser, juicier filling. Two to three tablespoons of all-purpose, or a scant two of cornstarch, gives a filling that slices.
- SugarOne cup to three cups of fruit is on the restrained side for rhubarb, which is genuinely sour. Taste a raw piece; forceful stalks can take another quarter cup.
- Layering the sugar and flourHalf the mixture goes under the fruit; the likely purpose is to absorb juice at the base and keep the bottom crust from turning to paste. Worth following.
- Pastry and panThree cups of fruit suits a small pie, an 8-inch or a shallow 9-inch. Cut vents in the top crust, and set the pie on a rimmed sheet, since rhubarb juice boils over readily.
- CoolingNo yield is given; three cups of fruit makes a modest pie. It needs at least two hours at room temperature before cutting. Sliced hot, the filling will run regardless of how much flour went in.
Rhubarb reached North American kitchen gardens in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and came to be known as "pie plant," a name attested in American use some decades later, since its stalks were too sour for much else and its arrival in April made it the first fresh fruit-like crop of the year, ahead of any berry. Cookbooks of the period treat pie plant pie as the opening act of the baking calendar. Its appearance here, in a flour miller's promotional cookbook, is characteristic: Washburn-Crosby's Gold Medal booklets were distributed to sell flour, so the branded tablespoon of it appears in the ingredient list of a pie that hardly needs thickening at all.