Rhubarb Pie
Use Plain Paste. For filling, mix two cups rhubarb cut in inch pieces, one cup sugar, two tablespoons each of butter, and flour, one egg, one eighth teaspoon salt, and one teaspoon lemon juice.
A terse filling formula that assumes you already have the book's Plain Paste and know how a two-crust fruit pie is assembled. The proportions are sound; what is missing is the pan size, the oven, and the time.
- Plain PasteThe book's basic short pastry, referred to but not repeated here. Any plain pie dough sufficient for a two-crust pie will stand in.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe names no pan. Two cups of cut rhubarb with a cup of sugar is a modest quantity that suits a shallow plate; in a deep modern pan it will look thin, and scaling the filling up by half is reasonable.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook was expected to judge her range. Start hot, around 425F, for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for another 35 to 45 minutes until the juices bubble thickly through the vents.
- Two tablespoons flour is the minimumRhubarb throws a great deal of water. Two tablespoons will give a loose, syrupy filling that runs when cut. Letting the sugared rhubarb stand 20 minutes and draining off some liquid, or going to three tablespoons of flour, gives a cleaner slice.
- The eggIt is there as a binder, not a custard. Beat it into the sugar and flour before adding the fruit so it does not set in streaks.
- Rhubarb itselfUse stalks only. The leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food; trim and discard them. Field rhubarb in late spring is stringier and more acid than forced hothouse stalks and may want more sugar.
- Lemon juiceOne teaspoon in an already sour fruit reads oddly, but it lifts the flavour and keeps the sugar from tasting flat. Keep it.
- CoolingCut warm, the filling will not hold. Give the pie at least two hours to set before serving.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer; it surrounded its promotional chocolate recipes with a full general cookery course, which is why a plain rhubarb pie has its place among the desserts. Rhubarb was in American kitchen gardens by the 1790s and early 1800s and became the first fruit-like thing of the year in the Northeast, harvested in April and May well before berries, which earned it the name pie plant in nineteenth-century seed catalogues and market lists. The stalk is a vegetable put to fruit purposes, and the heavy hand with sugar here is not excess but necessity. Recipes of this brevity were normal in books organized around master pastes: the writer gives you the filling and trusts you to have learned the crust elsewhere.