Rhubarb Pie
One cup stewed pie plant, cup sugar, yolk of 1 egg with 1 tablespoon flour stirred into it, little salt. Bake without top crust and frost. 1 cup sour cream
A single-crust custard pie, written in the compressed shorthand of a community cookbook, with one ingredient stranded at the end. Read it as a filling of stewed rhubarb, sugar, egg yolk thickened with flour, salt and sour cream, baked in a blind-friendly shell and topped with meringue.
- Pie plant is rhubarb"Pie plant" was an ordinary American name for rhubarb through the nineteenth century, and pies were among its commonest uses, along with stewed sauce and preserves. Only the stalks are used; rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and are discarded.
- The stray cup of sour creamThe final line reads as part of the filling rather than an instruction following the baking, most likely a late addition tacked onto the end of the entry. Stir it in with the yolk and flour.
- Sour cream then and nowIn a book of this period this meant raw cream that had thickened and soured on its own, richer and tangier than the cultured product sold today. Full-fat commercial sour cream or creme fraiche is the closest match; low-fat versions will weep in the oven.
- Stewed, not rawThe rhubarb goes in already cooked down. Stewing first drives off water that would otherwise thin the custard and leave the crust slack; drain it if it is very wet.
- SugarA cup of sugar to a cup of stewed rhubarb reads as very sweet by modern taste, and stewed rhubarb is often sweetened again in the pan. Reduce to two-thirds cup if the rhubarb has already been sugared.
- OvenThe recipe gives no heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it: bake until the custard is set at the edges and barely trembles at the centre, roughly 35 to 45 minutes. A hotter oven curdles an egg-and-cream filling.
- What "frost" meansMost likely a meringue: beat the white left from the yolk with two tablespoons of sugar, spread it over the baked filling, and return the pie to the oven until the peaks colour, about 10 minutes. A sugar icing is also possible.
- Size and yieldThe quantities make a shallow filling; a small shell of about 8 inches suits them best. In a 9-inch pan the layer will be thinner and set faster, so check it early.
Rhubarb was grown in American kitchen gardens less as a fruit than as a season marker: it came up in April, weeks before anything else worth putting in a crust. The name pie plant is generally taken to reflect nothing more than what the stalks were used for. Custard versions like this one, thickened with an egg yolk and enriched with soured cream, were one common way to handle it in the upper Midwest, where dairy was abundant and the sourness of the cream matched the sourness of the stalk rather than fighting it. The meringue top made use of the leftover white in the same sitting, a habit of thrift that runs through many egg recipes in books of this kind. The telegraphic style here is characteristic of subscription and church cookbooks, where contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew how to build a pie and needed only the proportions.