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Rhubarb Meringue
Line a pie-plate with plain paste.
Cut into inch pieces sufficient rhubarb to fill the plate, and sprinkle with flour until each piece is quite white. Place the rhubarb in the pie plate, adding one cup of sugar and a very little water. Bake slowly without a top crust, and when done spread over the top the beaten whites of two eggs into which has been stirred one tablespoon of sugar. Brown lightly in the oven.
A single-crust rhubarb pie finished with a thin meringue. The original assumes you know how to handle a wet fruit filling; the flour dredge is doing the real work.
- The hinge: coat every piece"Sprinkle with flour until each piece is quite white" is not a garnish step — it is the thickener. Toss the cut rhubarb in a bowl with roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour so all surfaces are dusted, otherwise the juice floods the shell and the crust turns to paste.
- Water"A very little water" means a tablespoon at most, and forced rhubarb or very fresh field rhubarb needs none at all. The stalks release a great deal of liquid once heated.
- Oven"Bake slowly" gives no figure; in a modern oven something around 350F suits this pie better than a true slow oven, since the pastry needs enough heat to set. Figure roughly 45 to 55 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft and the juices are visibly thickened and bubbling. Some bakers start hotter, near 425F for the first 10 minutes, to help the bottom crust — that is a modern habit, not part of the original.
- Meringue quantitiesTwo whites with one tablespoon of sugar gives a very lean, old-style meringue that browns fast and weeps easily. Beat to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually, and spread it so it seals to the crust edge all around.
- Browning"Brown lightly in the oven" is all the direction given. In a modern oven, roughly 350F for 12 to 15 minutes will set the meringue through, or a short spell nearer 425F for a few minutes if you only want colour. Spread it while the filling is still hot; that helps cook the underside of the meringue.
- SugarOne cup for a 9-inch plate is on the modest side for rhubarb. Taste a raw piece: late-season, thick green-and-red stalks may want a quarter cup more.
- Pie-plateA pie-plate of this period is shallower than a modern deep-dish tin. Use a standard 9-inch plate; a deep dish will need half again as much rhubarb and longer baking.
- LeavesTrim and discard all leaf material. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food; only the stalks are used.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six servings. Best eaten the day it is made — meringue over a juicy fruit filling does not survive refrigeration well.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal plant long before it was eaten, and only became a common pie fruit in the nineteenth century, once cheap sugar made its sourness manageable — hence the old name "pie plant," which appears in American cookbooks throughout the period. Its appeal was seasonal: rhubarb pushed up in early spring, weeks ahead of any orchard fruit, and filled the gap between the last stored apples and the first berries. The meringue finish here may reflect a late-Victorian habit of using up whites left from custards and cakes, and in a book like the Butterick, published by a pattern company for the practical housekeeper, it plausibly also served to dress a plain single-crust pie into something fit for company without extra pastry or expense — though the motive is a matter of inference rather than record.