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Pie-Plant Butter
Allow one pound of sugar to each pound of peeled and cut up rhubarb; let the rhubarb and sugar simmer gently for an hour, or more if the rhubarb is old and tough. This is a nice preserve, and children should be encouraged to eat it during the winter.
A two-ingredient preserve that depends entirely on patient reduction. The only real skills are keeping it from scorching and knowing when it is thick enough.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name was standard in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, from the plant's usual destination. Use field or forced stalks; either works, though forced (pale pink) rhubarb cooks down faster and stays a better colour.
- Discard the leavesRhubarb leaf blades contain oxalic acid and related compounds at levels that make them unfit to eat. Trim them off at the stalk and compost them; only the stalk is used.
- PeelingYoung spring stalks do not need peeling. The instruction applies to the "old and tough" stalks mentioned later, where the outer skin is stringy — strip it with a paring knife as you would celery.
- Equal weightsOne pound of sugar per pound of prepared rhubarb is a true 1:1 preserve, about 2 1/4 cups sugar to 1 lb rhubarb. Layer the two together and let them stand an hour before heating; the sugar draws out enough juice that no water is needed and the pan is less likely to catch.
- Heat and panUse the widest heavy-bottomed pan you have and keep the heat low once the sugar has dissolved. Rhubarb butter is thick and it sticks; stir to the bottom and corners every few minutes for the last half hour.
- Judging donenessAn hour is a guide, not a rule. It is done when a spoonful mounded on a chilled plate holds its shape and no watery ring seeps out at the edge, roughly 220F on a thermometer.
- Keeping it through the winterThe recipe assumes sealing that it never describes. Refrigerate and eat within a month, freeze it, or process half-pint jars by a current tested water-bath method if you want it shelf-stable.
"Pie-plant" was the ordinary American name for rhubarb through most of the nineteenth century, and it says plainly what the plant was for: it arrived in kitchen gardens as a tart filling long before anyone thought of it as a fruit in its own right. It mattered out of proportion to its flavour because it was the first thing in the garden — ready in April and May, weeks ahead of any real fruit, at the end of a winter lived on dried apples and root vegetables. That is the logic behind the closing line here. Preserving the spring crop in sugar meant something fresh-tasting on the table in February, and the period's general faith that sharp spring greens and stalks corrected the sluggishness of a winter diet may lie behind the instruction that children in particular "should be encouraged" to eat it, though the recipe leaves the point unexplained. The equal-weight sugar formula is the standard preserving ratio of the era: enough sugar to make the fruit keep, with the pleasant side effect that a sour plant becomes something a child will accept.