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Rhubarb Pie
Line a pie dish with good plain paste, wash the tender stalks of rhubarb, but do not peel. Cut them in thin slices, fill the dishes even full and to each pie allow five tablespoonfuls of sugar. Cover the pie with the upper crust, making a hole in the centre to allow the escape of
A bare-bones two-crust fruit pie of the kind that assumed the cook already knew how to handle pastry. The text breaks off mid-sentence at the steam vent, and it leaves out both a thickener and an oven temperature, so a little filling-in is needed.
- Sugar is the first thing to fixFive tablespoons is barely a third of a cup for a full pie of raw rhubarb, and low even by the standards of other recipes of the period. Most modern bakers use 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sugar for about 4 cups of sliced rhubarb, and even that reads sharp.
- No thickener is givenRhubarb throws a great deal of liquid and this filling will flood the crust. Toss the slices with 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour, or 2 to 3 of cornstarch or tapioca, along with the sugar, and let the mixture stand fifteen minutes before filling.
- "Good plain paste"Plain paste is a short crust made with fat, flour, salt and water only, without sugar or egg. Any standard double-crust pastry, rolled to fit a 9-inch dish, does the job.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A fruit pie of this type wants a hot start to set the bottom crust, around 425F for 15 to 20 minutes, then 350F for another 35 to 45 until the juices bubble thickly through the vent.
- "Fill the dishes even full"Rhubarb collapses considerably as it cooks, so mound the slices above the rim rather than levelling them; a flat fill leaves a hollow pie.
- Do not peel, but do checkThe instruction holds for young spring stalks, whose skin is thin and adds colour. Late-season stalks can be stringy enough to want peeling. Field rhubarb wants only a rinse and a trim at both ends.
- The leavesCut off and discard all leaf blade. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds at levels that make them unfit to eat; only the stalk is used.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Set it on a rimmed sheet, as the juices will run over.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal plant long before it was food, the dried root having been a valued purgative imported from Asia; the stalks only became a common dessert filling in the nineteenth century, once cheap sugar made their sharpness manageable. It earned the name pie plant in America precisely because that was what it was for, and botanically a rhubarb stalk is a leaf stem rather than a fruit. It was prized as the first thing to come up in the kitchen garden, weeks ahead of any berry, which is why rhubarb pie carried such weight in the spring cooking of households that had spent the winter on preserves and dried apples.