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Rhubarb Sauce
Peel and cut rhubarb in one-inch pieces. Put in a saucepan, sprinkle generously with sugar, and add enough water to prevent rhubarb from burning. Rhubarb contains such a large percentage of water that but little additional water is needed. Cook until soft. If rhubarb is covered with boiling water, allowed to stand five minutes, then drained and cooked, less sugar will be required. Rhubarb is sometimes baked in an earthen pudding-dish. If baked slowly for a for a long time it has a rich red color.
A one-paragraph method from Fannie Farmer that assumes you know your rhubarb. The important variables are sugar, water and heat, and only one of them needs much of your attention.
- Leaves are not optional to removeRhubarb leaf blades contain oxalic acid and soluble oxalates in quantities that make them inedible. Trim them off and discard; only the stalks are used here, and the book takes that for granted.
- PeelingFarmer's instruction to peel probably reflects the coarser field rhubarb of the period. Modern forced and hothouse stalks are tender enough that peeling wastes both color and flesh; strip only the stringy outer skin from thick, late-season stalks.
- WaterTwo to three tablespoons for a pound of rhubarb is plenty. The stalks are roughly 90 percent water and will collapse into their own juice within a few minutes.
- "Sprinkle generously with sugar"Start at about 1/2 cup sugar per pound of trimmed rhubarb and taste once it has broken down. Sugar draws out juice, so if you have time, toss and let it stand half an hour before heat goes under it.
- The blanching trickPouring boiling water over the cut stalks, standing five minutes and draining leaches out some of the free acid, so less sugar is needed. It also washes away flavor and color; use it only for very sour spring rhubarb.
- Cook until soft, and no furtherOn the stovetop this is five to ten minutes. Stir as little as possible if you want the pieces to hold their shape, since rhubarb goes to threads and purée almost the moment it softens.
- The baked versionFarmer gives no temperature, only 'baked slowly for a long time'; a low oven of around 300F answers that description. Ninety minutes to two hours in an earthenware dish, undisturbed, gives whole pieces and the deep red she describes, which comes from long gentle heat rather than from any added color.
- YieldA pound of trimmed stalks makes roughly two cups of sauce, enough for four as a side dish or spooned over pudding, and it keeps a week refrigerated.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a stalk; the culinary use of the leafstalks spread in Britain in the early nineteenth century and had become an ordinary spring standby in New England by Farmer's day. The common name "pieplant" survives from exactly that habit of treating it as fruit. Its appeal in a nineteenth-century household was timing: rhubarb pushes up in April and May, weeks ahead of any berry, and a sharp cooked sauce came early in the season. The note about slow baking producing a rich red color is practical rather than decorative, since the boiled version tends toward a drab pink, and the deeper color of the oven method made a better showing at table.