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Spiced Rhubarb
1 T cinnamon 1 T cloves 1 C vinegar Boil thirty minutes. Pour in jelly glasses. 1 T allspice Mrs. C. E. Grummitt.
This is a sweet-sour spiced rhubarb relish of a type once common on the meat platter, but the printed text has been scrambled and gutted in typesetting: the rhubarb itself and the sugar have no quantities, and the spice line is broken across the method. What survives cannot be followed.
- The missing ingredientsA spiced rhubarb of this kind depends on a stated weight of rhubarb and a stated weight of sugar against the single cup of vinegar. Without them there is no way to know the finished acidity or sugar concentration, which are the two things keeping the jars from spoiling.
- Open-kettle sealing"Pour in jelly glasses" implies the old open-kettle method: hot preserve poured straight into tumblers with no further processing. The recipe gives no sealing instruction at all; period practice for such glasses was usually a poured wax or paraffin disc. Current practice rejects open-kettle filling for anything intended to keep, because the seal is unreliable and mould can grow under the wax. A modern tested recipe with a measured boiling-water process should be used instead.
- What the abbreviations meanC is a cup; T in books of this period is usually a tablespoon, though the abbreviation is not always consistent, so the spicing is most likely one tablespoon each of cinnamon, cloves and allspice to a cup of vinegar. Whether ground or whole is not said.
- Jelly glassesThe straight-sided tumblers of the period held roughly six to eight ounces each. Because the rhubarb and sugar are missing from the text, the yield cannot be worked out.
- Thirty minutes of boilingRhubarb collapses in a few minutes, so half an hour reads less as a cooking time than as a reduction, boiling the syrup down in the pan; little recognisable fruit would be likely to survive it.
- Rhubarb leavesOnly the stalks are food. The leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not used.
Spiced rhubarb belongs to the tradition of sweet-sour fruit relishes, heavy with cinnamon, cloves and allspice, set out beside roast pork, ham or cold meat in the same role as spiced currants, pickled peaches and apple chutney. Rhubarb was among the first things a garden gave up in spring, and it was widely called pieplant. Community cookbooks of this kind were compiled as fundraisers from recipes contributed by members, each signed with the contributor's married name, and the state of this entry -- quantities missing and the spice list broken across the method -- is the sort of damage such hurried compiling produced.