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Rhubarb Pie
Break the peeled rhubarb into small pieces, flour them until they are quite white and add a cup of sugar for each pie. Line a pie dish, put in the rhubarb, with the sugar well stirred into it, cover with the upper crust, and bake one hour. Serve cold, sprinkling powdered sugar on top.
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A plain two-crust rhubarb pie of the sort that assumes the cook already knows her pastry. The book gives no oven temperature and no quantity of rhubarb, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified because the original reader judged her own range. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for the remaining 45 minutes. The hour total in the original is about right for a deep pie of raw rhubarb.
- How much rhubarbA 9-inch pie takes roughly 4 cups of cut stalks, about 1 1/4 lb trimmed. The recipe measures only the sugar, one cup per pie, which is on the modest side for modern palates and forced rhubarb; taste a raw piece and go to 1 1/4 cups if it makes your jaw ache.
- "Flour them until they are quite white"This is the thickener, and it is the hinge of the recipe. Toss the cut rhubarb in flour until every piece is dusted and no wet patches remain, which works out to 3 to 4 tablespoons; without it the juice floods the crust. Mix the sugar in only just before filling, or the fruit will start weeping in the bowl.
- PeelingThe instruction to peel suggests stalks coarser or stringier than much of what is sold now; older field-grown stems, especially late in the season, can be tough-skinned. Modern hothouse and early field stalks are generally tender and the red skin carries most of the colour, so peel only thick late-season stems, and trim rather than peel the rest.
- The leavesOnly the stalks are food. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds in quantities that make them inedible; cut them off and discard them rather than adding them to the pot for colour or bulk.
- Venting and spillsThe original says nothing about steam vents, but rhubarb throws a great deal of juice. Slash the top crust and set the dish on a foil-lined sheet, since boil-over onto the oven floor is the usual failure here.
- ServingCooling is not fussiness: the floured juices need time to set, and a warm rhubarb pie will run. The dusting of powdered sugar goes on after the pie is cold, or it dissolves into syrup. One pie serves six to eight.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal plant long before it was eaten, and its rise as a dessert fruit tracks the spread of cheap sugar in the nineteenth century — without a great deal of it, the stalks are close to unpalatable. By the 1890s it was a fixture of the early spring table, the first thing out of the kitchen garden after a winter of dried and preserved fruit, which earned it the old nickname "pie plant" in American seed catalogues and cookbooks. Its appearance here is characteristic of the period's household manuals: a recipe of three sentences, no oven temperature, no quantity of fruit, addressed to a cook who needed reminding of the sugar and the flour and nothing else. What the stray "T" at the end signifies is unclear.