Pie-Plant Pie
Mix half tea-cup white sugar and one heaping tea-spoon flour together, sprinkle over the bottom crust, then add the pie-plant cut up fine; sprinkle over this another half tea-cup sugar and heaping tea-spoon flour; bake fully three-quarters of an hour in a slow oven. Or, stew the pie-plant, sweeten, add grated rind and juice of a lemon and yolks of two eggs, and bake and frost like lemon pie. - Mrs. D. Buxton.
Two pies in one entry: a plain open rhubarb pie and a rhubarb custard finished with meringue. Both are workable, but the sugar, thickening and oven directions need translating.
- Pie-plant is rhubarbThe name was common in nineteenth-century American books, where the plant appears chiefly in pies and stewed sauces. Use the stalks only, cut into 1/2-inch pieces; trim and discard all leaf material, which contains oxalic acid and is genuinely poisonous.
- What a tea-cup means hereA nineteenth-century tea-cup is not a standard measuring cup. Treat each half tea-cup of sugar as about 1/3 cup, so roughly 2/3 cup total for a 9-inch pie. That is on the tart side for modern palates; a full cup is closer to modern sweetness.
- "Slow oven"Around 300F. Three-quarters of an hour at that temperature will not set a bottom crust under wet fruit. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to establish the crust, then drop to 350F until the filling bubbles thickly, about 40 minutes more.
- Thickening is under-measuredTwo heaping teaspoons of flour will not hold the juice that rhubarb releases. Figure 3 to 4 tablespoons of flour, or 2 to 3 tablespoons of cornstarch, tossed with the sugar and fruit rather than layered dry on the crust.
- No top crust is specifiedThe recipe mentions only a bottom crust, so the first version reads as an open pie. If you prefer a covered pie, cut steam vents and add 10 minutes to the bake.
- "Frost like lemon pie"Frosting means meringue: the two whites left over from the yolks, beaten with about 2 tablespoons sugar each, spread to the crust edge and browned. A short bake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes sets it.
- The custard version needs a baked shellStewed sweetened rhubarb with lemon and yolks goes into a partly blind-baked crust, or the moisture will keep the pastry pale and soft. Bake until the center barely trembles, then meringue.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six servings. Allow about 1 1/4 lb trimmed rhubarb, roughly 4 cups cut.
"Pie-plant" was the ordinary American name for rhubarb through most of the nineteenth century, and it tells you exactly how the plant was regarded: not a vegetable to be served at dinner but a crop grown for the pastry shelf. Rhubarb is generally said to have reached North American gardens from Europe in the late eighteenth century, and it had obvious advantages for the kitchen garden, since it came up early, before any tree fruit, and survived hard winters without attention. The doubled layers of sugar and flour, sprinkled above and below the fruit rather than mixed into it, are a common older device for absorbing juice in a shallow open pie; the second variation, thickened with yolks and finished with meringue, is simply the standard lemon-pie method borrowed for a tart fruit that behaves much the same way.