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Baked Pie-Plant
Cut in pieces about an inch long, put in baking-dish in layers with an equal weight of sugar, cover closely and bake.
Two lines of text and no temperature, time or yield — this is a nineteenth-century cook's shorthand for baked rhubarb, and it works once you supply the numbers.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name was common American usage through the 1800s, when rhubarb was grown chiefly for pies and other sweet dishes. Use trimmed stalks only.
- Discard the leavesRhubarb leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid and related compounds and are not edible. Cut them off and compost them; only the pink-to-green stalk is used.
- Oven and timeA covered dish of rhubarb wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for 30 to 45 minutes, until the pieces are tender but still holding some shape. Longer and you have sauce rather than baked fruit.
- Cover closely means itThere is no added liquid in this recipe. The rhubarb has to stew in its own juice, so a tight lid or a sheet of foil crimped over the dish is the whole technique. Uncovered, the top layer dries and scorches.
- Equal weight of sugar is a lotPound for pound gives a preserve-sweet result, closer to a conserve than a dessert. Modern palates are generally happy at a third to half the weight of the fruit — about 5 to 8 oz sugar per pound of stalks — and forced spring rhubarb generally needs less than late-season field rhubarb.
- Use a non-reactive dishRhubarb is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or uncoated cast iron. Glass, ceramic or enamelled cast iron is better.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of rhubarb fills a medium baking dish and serves four to six. Serve warm or cold with cream, custard, or plain yogurt; the syrup that collects is worth spooning over.
"Pie-plant" tells you exactly how rhubarb entered the American kitchen: not as a vegetable but as the earliest tart filling of the year, available in April and May when the previous season's stored apples were finished and nothing else in the garden had come in. It reached American gardens by the late eighteenth century and spread fast, being hardy, perennial and nearly impossible to kill. Cooks of the period commonly treated it as a fruit regardless of botany — a habit said to have been ratified, at least in the United States, by a customs ruling that taxed rhubarb as fruit, though the story is retold more often than it is sourced. Baking rather than stewing may well have been the frugal option in a wood-stove kitchen: the dish went in beside whatever else was already occupying the oven, and needed no watching and no water.