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Rhubarb Pie
Carefully scrape the skin of one pound sound, fresh rhubarb; cut into one inch pieces, then place in a saucepan with four ounces granulated sugar and one teaspoon cornstarch. Set the pan on a brisk fire, stir well with a wooden spoon, and let briskly cook for fifteen minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Prepare a pie paste and proceed to finish the pie.
The instructions stop just as the pie begins, which is typical of a book that expects you to already own a pastry recipe. What is here is a stovetop filling, cooked down before it ever meets the crust — the detail that keeps the bottom from going soggy.
- Weights and measuresOne pound of trimmed rhubarb is about 3 to 3 1/2 cups of one-inch pieces. Four ounces of granulated sugar is a generous 1/2 cup by volume. This is a modest amount of filling — enough for a 7- or 8-inch pie, or a shallow 9-inch; double it for a deep double-crust pie.
- Leaves are not optional to removeRhubarb leaves and the leaf stubs contain oxalic acid and related compounds and are not edible. Use only the stalks, and cut away any leaf tissue before scraping.
- Skip the scraping"Scrape the skin" made sense for thick, coarse field rhubarb. Modern hothouse and early-season stalks are tender and much of their colour is in the skin; peeling them costs you the pink. Trim the ends and stringy edges only if the stalks are large and fibrous.
- "Brisk fire"Medium-high heat. Rhubarb throws a lot of water at first, then thickens quickly and will catch on the pan bottom, which is why the recipe insists on frequent stirring. Fifteen minutes is right for reducing it to a thick compote; at that point the pieces will have collapsed.
- Why so little cornstarchOne teaspoon looks thin for a fruit pie, but the filling is cooked down first, so most of the juice has already gone off as steam. If your rhubarb was very juicy and the mixture still slumps, reduce it further rather than adding more starch.
- Cool before fillingLet the cooked filling go cold before it touches the pastry. Hot filling melts the butter or lard in the raw bottom crust and guarantees a heavy, damp base.
- OvenThe recipe stops before the bake and gives no oven guidance. In a modern oven, for a double-crust pie, start at 425F for about 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 375F for another 25 to 30 minutes until the crust is browned. Since the fruit is already cooked, you are baking only the pastry.
- Seasoning it forwardThe recipe is deliberately plain. Rhubarb takes well to a strip of orange zest, a scrape of ginger, or a spoonful of strawberries added in the last few minutes of cooking, if you want them.
Rhubarb reached European kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a fruit; the culinary stalk-eating habit belongs mainly to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, once cheap sugar made its sourness manageable. By the time this book was compiled, it was the first "fruit" of the year in northern gardens and cold frames, and it appears in plenty of American cookbooks of the era and tells you exactly what it was grown for. The method here, stewing the fruit and thickening it on the stove before it goes into the shell, looks like the habit of a kitchen used to turning out pies in numbers: it controls the filling exactly and takes the guesswork out of the bake.