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Baked Rhubarb
Prepare as for stewing and place in baking-dish in a slow oven. Sprinkle generously with sugar and add a little water. Bake until the rhubarb is reduced to a soft, dark red pulp..
The instruction is barely more than a note, which is typical of turn-of-the-century fruit cookery: the writer assumed you already knew how to stew rhubarb. Here is what the blanks contain.
- "A slow oven"In period terms roughly 250-300F. The low heat is the point: it lets the stalks collapse gently rather than boil hard, and keeps the syrup from catching at the edges.
- Discard the leaves entirely"Prepare as for stewing" means trimming off both the leaf and the tough base. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantities that make them genuinely unfit to eat; only the stalk is food.
- QuantitiesNone are given. A workable ratio is 2 lb rhubarb cut in 1-inch lengths, 3/4 to 1 cup sugar, and 2 to 3 tablespoons water — no more, since the stalks are mostly water and will flood the dish on their own.
- "A little water"Just enough to start the sugar dissolving before the fruit gives up its own juice. Any more and you get thin pink soup rather than the dark pulp described.
- TimingRoughly 45 minutes to an hour at that heat, covered for the first half.
- VesselUse glass, glazed earthenware or enamelled cast iron. Rhubarb is acid enough to take on a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined cast iron.
- Yield and serving2 lb of stalks gives about four servings. Serve warm or cold with cream, or as a base under a batter or crumble; the pulp also keeps a few days refrigerated.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal plant long before it was a dessert — the dried root was a purgative in the pharmacopoeia, and the stalks were only widely eaten as a sweetened fruit once cheap sugar made them palatable in the nineteenth century. By the era of the printed household cook book, rhubarb was the standard first fruit of the year in northern gardens, arriving weeks ahead of berries, and the pie plant, as it was commonly called, appeared in spring menus by default. Baking rather than stewing had its advantages: it needed no watching, wasted no juice, and produced the concentrated pulp that could then go into pies, puddings, or a fool with cream.