Rhubarb Tart
INGREDIENTS for tart of medium size. lb. of puff-paste, about 5 sticks of large rhubarb, Ib. of moist sugar. AVERAGE COST, 10d. INGREDIENTS for tart of medium size.—1/2 lb. of puff-paste, about 5 sticks of large rhubarb, 1/4 lb. of moist sugar. AVERAGE COST, 10d.
Make a puff-crust; line the edges of a deep pie-dish with it, and wash, wipe and cut the rhubarb into pieces about 1 inch long. Should it be old and tough, string it-that is to say, pare off the outside skin.
Pile the fruit high in the dish, as it shrinks very much in the cooking; put in the sugar, cover with crust, ornament the edges and bake the tart in a well-heated oven from 1/2 to hour. If wanted very nice, brush it over with the white of an egg beaten to a stiff froth, then sprinkle on it some sifted sugar, and put it in the oven just to set the glaze: this should be done when the tart is nearly baked. A small quantity of lemonjuice and a little of the peel, minced, are by many persons considered an improvement to the flavour of rhubarb tart.
TIME. to hour.
SEASONABLE from February to May.
The fractions have been lost from this transcription, as often happens with old print; the quantities below are the standard ones for a tart of this size in Beeton's other fruit-tart entries.
- The missing fractionsRead the paste as ½ lb (about 225 g) and the baking time as ½ to ¾ hour, which the surviving "1/2 to" supports. The sugar cannot be recovered from this transcription; Beeton's rhubarb tart is usually printed with ¼ lb of moist sugar, so take that as the likelier reading. Five sticks of "large" rhubarb is perhaps a pound to a pound and a half once trimmed.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar was a damp, partly refined brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest match; plain granulated works and gives a cleaner, sharper result.
- Well-heated ovenThe book gives no temperatures. As a modern equivalent, a hot oven of about 425F/220C suits puff pastry; dropping to about 375F/190C part-way will let the fruit cook through without the crust colouring too far, though Beeton says nothing of this.
- Leaves off, alwaysUse stalks only. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not edible; trim them away and discard, along with any dried-out ends.
- Piling the fruit highThis is the instruction that matters. Beeton notes the rhubarb "shrinks very much in the cooking", so a flat filling leaves a hollow dome of pastry. Mound it well above the rim of the dish.
- Only the edges are linedBeeton lines the rim of a deep dish and covers the top -- there is no bottom crust. This is her standard construction for fruit tarts in a deep dish; she offers no reason for it, though a base under so juicy a fruit would certainly suffer.
- The egg-white glazeWhisk one white to a stiff froth, brush it on and dust with sifted sugar when the tart is nearly baked, as Beeton directs. Return it to the oven only long enough to set the glaze; longer and it browns and weeps.
- Juice controlA tablespoon of cornflour or two of ground almonds tossed with the fruit will thicken the liquid. Beeton does not, and a plainly made rhubarb tart is genuinely wet in the dish.
Rhubarb reached British kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as fruit -- the dried rhizome was a purgative imported from Russia and China, and only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did the forced stalk become a garden crop for the table. Beeton's "seasonable from February to May" marks it out as the first fresh sweet filling of the year, arriving from the forcing beds when the stored apples were finished and the summer fruit had not begun; that gap in the calendar is often said to be a large part of why rhubarb earned a fixed place in the English pastry repertoire. The note that old stalks should be "stringed" suggests a period when households were more likely to pull from their own beds than to buy uniform young stems, and the suggestion of lemon juice and minced peel reflects a common Victorian practice of lifting fruit flavours with citrus.