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Rhubarb Tart
796. Cut the stalks in lengths of one or two inches, having, if old, taken off the thin skin. Lay them in a dish, and put over a tablespoonful of sugar, then cover with short-crust or puff-paste (see pages 200-1), and bake for half-an-hour to three-quarters. Some add A little grated nutmeg.
A deep-dish fruit tart in the English sense: fruit heaped in a dish, a lid of pastry over the top, no bottom crust. The method is sound, but the sugar and the oven need translating.
- Leaves off, alwaysOnly the stalks are used. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid at levels high enough to be poisonous and should be cut away and discarded, not composted into a stockpot.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A reasonable modern equivalent is 400F for the first 15 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then 350F for the remainder; the stated half to three-quarters of an hour is roughly in line with that, but check the pastry and the fruit rather than the clock.
- The sugar is lightA single tablespoonful over a whole dish of rhubarb produces something distinctly sharp by current tastes. The recipe gives no weight of fruit; for roughly 1.5 lb of trimmed stalks a modern cook would generally want 4 to 6 oz of sugar.
- Juice managementRhubarb throws a great deal of liquid, and with no bottom crust it has nowhere to go but up under the lid. Toss the cut stalks with a tablespoon of cornflour or ground rice along with the sugar, and use a pie funnel or cut a vent so steam escapes rather than lifting the pastry off.
- Peeling old stalksThe instruction to strip the thin skin applies to late-season field rhubarb, which is stringy. Early forced rhubarb, pale pink and tender, needs nothing but trimming and washing.
- Pastry choiceShort-crust gives a firmer lid that holds up to the juice; puff sits higher but goes soggy underneath faster. Either way, wet the rim of the dish and press the pastry to it so the lid does not slide.
- NutmegThe optional grating is worth doing, though a strip of orange zest or a little grated ginger also sits well with rhubarb.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a guide, a dish of about 1.5 lb of rhubarb under a single crust will serve about six, with cream, custard or ice cream.
Rhubarb reached English kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as fruit; the stalks became a common tart filling in the earlier nineteenth century, by which time market gardeners in the London area were forcing them under pots for a tender, early, pink crop. By the middle of the century rhubarb was cheap, prolific and one of the first fresh things available after winter, which is why it appears with such minimal ceremony here. The form of the dish is the standard English deep tart, fruit in a dish with pastry laid over the top, and the entry's cross-reference to the pastry pages is typical of the period's compressed style: the crust is assumed knowledge, and only the fruit needs describing.