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Stewed Pie-Plant
Make a rich syrup by adding sugar to water in which long strips of orange peel have been boiled until tender, lay into it a single layer of pieces of pie-plant three inches long, and stew gently until clear. When done remove and cook another layer. This makes a handsome dessert-dish, ornamented with puff-paste cut in fanciful shapes. Use one orange to two and a half pounds pie-plant.
Pie-plant is rhubarb, and this is a syrup-poached rhubarb dessert rather than a stew. The whole method rests on cooking the stalks in a single layer so they hold their shape.
- Pie-plant means rhubarbNineteenth-century American cookbooks commonly call rhubarb "pie-plant," often alongside the word rhubarb itself. Use the stalks only; rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are always discarded.
- The syrup is left to your judgmentThe original gives no sugar-to-water ratio. A heavy syrup of equal volumes sugar and water, about 2 cups each, is enough to poach 2 1/2 lb of stalks in batches, and rhubarb is tart enough to want it.
- Orange peel firstSimmer the peel of one orange in the water until it is tender, 20 to 30 minutes, before adding the sugar. Pare it thin, taking as little white pith as possible, or the syrup turns bitter.
- Single layer, and mean itCrowding the pan is what turns poached rhubarb into sauce. Lay the three-inch pieces in one layer with room between them, and lift each batch out before the next goes in.
- "Until clear" is fastExpect 3 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer, depending on stalk thickness. The pieces turn translucent and yield to a skewer while still intact; a minute past that and they collapse.
- CoolingLift the pieces out with a slotted spoon onto a plate rather than back into the syrup, or they keep cooking. Reduce the leftover syrup a little and spoon it over once everything is cool.
- The puff-paste garnishFrozen puff pastry, cut in leaves or diamonds and baked at 400F until browned, stands in for the period's homemade rough puff. Bake it separately and add it at the table so it stays crisp.
- YieldTwo and a half pounds of rhubarb serves six to eight as a dessert, more if it accompanies cream or custard.
Rhubarb reached American gardens as a medicinal root and became a kitchen plant in the early nineteenth century; the name "pie-plant" reflects the use it was most often put to. It was prized because it came up in April, weeks before any tree fruit, and cheaper sugar made its ferocious acidity manageable. This recipe belongs to a genteel strand of nineteenth-century cookery that treated the same humble stalk as a compote: poached in syrup, kept whole, arranged on a glass dish and framed with pastry cut-outs, in the manner of the French compotes that American cookbooks of the period were adapting. The orange peel does double duty, perfuming the syrup and adding the bitter edge that keeps sweetened rhubarb from tasting flat.