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Canned Pie Plant
Cut the pie plant in pieces, two inches long, put over a slow fire with its weight in sugar; when sugar is dissolved let it boil slowly until clear, but do not let it cook long enough to become dark colored. Put up in air-tight cans.
A one-to-one rhubarb-and-sugar preserve from a period when "canning" meant filling a jar with hot fruit and screwing the lid down. The cooking is sound; the preservation step, as written, is not one that can be recommended today.
- No processing step at allThe recipe ends at "put up in air-tight cans" — no boiling-water bath, no time, no headspace, no check that the seal actually formed. Instructions of this kind appear to have depended on the fruit going into the jar boiling hot and driving out air as it cooled. That produces an unverifiable seal, and a jar that fails quietly will mold or ferment without obvious warning.
- Why the risk here is spoilage, not botulismRhubarb is strongly acidic, generally around pH 3.1, and the sugar load is enormous, so Clostridium botulinum is not the concern it would be with a low-acid vegetable. What fails is the barrier: yeasts and molds tolerate both acid and sugar happily. Use a current tested recipe from a modern preserving guide if you want to put rhubarb up in jars.
- Pie plant is rhubarbThe name was standard in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, since rhubarb's overwhelming use was as pie filling. Only the stalks are food.
- The leaves are not edibleRhubarb leaf blades carry high levels of oxalic acid and related compounds and have caused poisonings. Trim them off and discard them; do not compost them into anything that will be eaten.
- "Its weight in sugar"Equal weights, so a pound of trimmed stalks to a pound of sugar. Modern rhubarb preserves usually run well below that; the original ratio is a preservative measure as much as a flavoring one, and the result is very sweet.
- "Slow fire" and "until clear"Low heat until the sugar dissolves into the juice rhubarb throws off almost immediately, then a bare simmer. "Clear" is the visual cue that the syrup has thickened and the pieces have gone translucent — the point just before the sugar begins to caramelize and darken.
- If you cook it anywayMade as a fresh preserve and kept in the refrigerator rather than sealed and shelved, the cooking method above is perfectly reasonable. The two-inch pieces are likely to break down toward a rough compote.
Rhubarb reached American kitchen gardens as a medicinal plant — the dried root was a long-established purgative in the European pharmacopoeia — and only became a food crop in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, once cheap sugar made the stalks palatable. Because it comes up in April, weeks before any tree fruit, it earned the affectionate name "pie plant" and a fixed place in the spring calendar of the American household. The Dixie Cook Book, like most compendia of its era, devotes a long section to canning fruits because putting up the year's produce was a domestic obligation rather than a hobby; the technology, though, was still crude. Mason's screw-top jar had been patented in 1858 and was widespread by the time this book appeared, but understanding of why processing worked lagged well behind the hardware, and instructions of this vintage routinely stop at "air-tight" without saying how one would know.