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Pie Plant Pie
Mrs. Carson.
One cup of stewed pie plant, one cup of sugar, one tablespoon of flour, yolk of one egg; flavour with lemon; beat all together thoroughly. Don't use pie plant too hot for fear it will cook the egg. Bake with just an under crust, and use white of an egg for frosting.
A single-crust rhubarb custard pie with a meringue top, written for cooks who already knew how to line a pie plate. Two things are unstated: the oven and the yield.
- Pie plant is rhubarbThe name was standard in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century, when rhubarb was grown largely for pies rather than eaten as a vegetable. Use the stalks only; the leaves contain oxalic acid and are discarded.
- One cup of stewed rhubarbThat means rhubarb already cooked down soft, not raw diced stalks. Something under a pound of trimmed stalks, stewed with a splash of water, will give roughly a cup once drained. Drain off excess liquid or the custard will not set.
- The hinge: cool the fruitThe warning about not using the rhubarb too hot is the whole technique. Hot fruit scrambles the yolk into threads instead of forming a smooth custard. Let it come down to lukewarm before beating anything in.
- OvenNone is given. A rhubarb custard of this kind wants a moderate oven, 350-375F, until the centre is just set and no longer sloshes, usually 35-45 minutes. Too hot and the egg curdles and weeps.
- Just an under crustA single bottom crust, no lid. Partly baking the shell first (blind baking) helps, since a wet filling and a slow set are the classic route to a soggy base.
- Flavour with lemonPeriod recipes meant either grated rind or a few drops of lemon extract. About a teaspoon of zest suits a cup of fruit; extract should be used by the half teaspoon.
- The frostingThis is a meringue: the reserved white beaten stiff, usually with a tablespoon or two of sugar, spread over the baked filling and returned to the oven briefly to colour. Spread it to the crust edge on all sides so it does not shrink back.
- YieldOne cup of fruit and one cup of sugar makes a shallow filling for an 8-inch plate, cutting into about six modest wedges. Double it for a 9-inch pie with any depth.
- SweetnessEqual sugar to fruit reads as very sweet now, but rhubarb is aggressively sour. Reducing the sugar by a quarter is safe; the tablespoon of flour and the yolk are doing the thickening, not the sugar.
Rhubarb reached American kitchen gardens by around the turn of the nineteenth century and spread through them in the decades that followed, and was so completely identified with one use that it simply became "pie plant" — a plant for pies, the way "eggplant" is named for its shape. Its appeal was seasonal timing: the stalks are ready in spring, weeks before any tree fruit or berry, which made pie plant an early pie of the year in northern households and gave it a place in many community cookbooks of the period. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women and sold for charitable purposes, is a good example of the form, and Mrs. Carson's entry shows the compressed house style of such books: no oven, no pan size, no baking time, because contributors generally assumed a reader who had made a custard pie before and needed only the proportions.