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Rhubarb Tartlets
Neatly trim one pound fresh rhubarb, remove the fibres, wash in cold water, drain and cut into pieces one inch long. Place in a small saucepan with four ounces fine sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence. Mix well with a wooden spoon, cover the pan, set on the fire and let gently cook for twenty minutes, being careful to frequently stir at the bottom meantime. Prepare six tartlet crusts and fill with the rhubarb preparation. Dredge a little fine sugar over and serve.
A straightforward stewed-rhubarb filling in pre-baked shells. The only real technique here is keeping the fruit from catching and from collapsing entirely to water.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pound of trimmed rhubarb is roughly 4 cups of one-inch pieces. Four ounces of "fine sugar" is caster or granulated sugar, about 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon by volume; weigh it if you can, as the volume equivalent drifts with the grind.
- Removing the fibresField rhubarb of the period was often coarse and stringy. Modern forced or hothouse stalks are tender and generally need no peeling; strip the strings only from thick, ridged outdoor stalks, and never use the leaves, which contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely toxic.
- Twenty minutes is a maximum, not a targetCovered over low heat, rhubarb releases its own liquid within five minutes and begins to break down soon after. Check at ten; you want a thick, jammy compote that holds a mound, not a loose sauce that will soak the pastry.
- Watch the sugarFour ounces to a pound of fruit is a moderate proportion for rhubarb and may still taste tart. Taste at the end of cooking and adjust rather than at the start, since the acidity of stalks varies a great deal.
- Draining before fillingIf the finished compote is watery, tip it into a sieve, catch the syrup, reduce it separately and stir it back. Excess juice in a tartlet shell is the usual cause of a sodden base.
- The crusts"Prepare six tartlet crusts" means small pastry shells baked blind and cooled; the size and pastry are left to the cook. The book assumes you already have a pastry to hand, and since nothing is baked after filling, the shells must be cooked through.
- VanillaHalf a teaspoon of essence in a pound of fruit is assertive by modern taste. Vanilla extract, or a scraped half-pod cooked with the rhubarb and removed, gives a rounder result.
- Yield and servingSix small tartlets, served the day they are filled, at room temperature. The dusting of fine sugar goes on at the last moment or it dissolves into the fruit.
Rhubarb reached European kitchens as a medicine long before it became a dessert: the dried root was a valued purgative in the drug trade, and the stalks were only widely eaten for pudding once cheap sugar made them palatable, which in Britain was largely a nineteenth-century development. Forced rhubarb, from the Yorkshire growing sheds and their equivalents elsewhere, later made pink, tender stalks available well before other fruit came into season, which is one reason rhubarb turns up often in late-winter and spring pastry work. Small blind-baked shells filled with a seasonal compote and finished with a dredge of sugar are a common pattern in professional pastry work of this kind.