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Rhubarb with Meringue
Cut the rhubarb into short lengths, put it in a saucepan with a small quantity of water and stew it gently until it is tender; then mash it together with about one pound of moist sugar and stir it over the fire for about ten minutes longer; then turn it into a pie-dish. Whisk the whites of two eggs to a firm froth with one tablespoonful of powdered sugar, spread it over the rhubarb and put it in a brisk oven until lightly browned. Serve while hot.
A plain stewed-rhubarb pudding under a thin cap of meringue. The original gives a weight for the sugar but not for the rhubarb, which is the main thing to sort out before you start.
- Missing quantity of rhubarbThe recipe weighs the sugar but not the fruit, and names no dish size. A pound of sugar suits something in the region of 2 lb of trimmed stalks; scaled that way it is still very sweet by current taste, and 10-12 oz handles the acidity without turning the dish into jam.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar with some molasses still in it, closest today to light muscovado or turbinado. Plain granulated works and gives a cleaner, pinker fruit; the darker sugar gives a caramel note.
- Brisk oven425-450F. At that heat the meringue colours in 4-6 minutes, so watch it rather than time it. A moderate 350F for 12-15 minutes gives a drier, more stable topping if you want to hold the dish briefly.
- Trim the leavesRhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and should be cut away and discarded; only the stalks are eaten. Any leaf trace at the top of the stalk goes in the bin.
- The ten minutes over the fireThis second stage is the hinge: mashing with the sugar and stirring for ten minutes drives off water and thickens the fruit so the meringue does not sink into a puddle. Skip it and the topping weeps.
- Meringue techniqueThe original whisks the whites with the tablespoon of powdered sugar from the start; if you prefer, whisk to firm peaks first and beat the sugar in after, as early sugar slows the foam. Spread it right to the rim of the dish so it anchors and does not shrink back.
- Hot fruit, hot toppingPut the meringue on while the rhubarb is still hot. That gives the underside of the foam some cooking from below, which matters here because the oven time is too short to set a thick layer through.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of fruit or size of dish, so servings depend on how much rhubarb you use. Whatever the size, it must be eaten the day it is made; a soft meringue over wet fruit collapses and weeps in the refrigerator.
Rhubarb reached the English and American kitchen as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as fruit, and stalks were not common in markets until the nineteenth century, when forced early rhubarb became a fixture of the late-winter table. Its arrival before other fruit earned it the name "pie plant" in America. Heavy sugaring is usual in recipes of this period, though how sour the unimproved stalks were is inference rather than record. A meringue lid was a common way of using up whites left from a custard or an ice, and it appears over lemon, apple and rhubarb alike.