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Rhubarb Pie
1 pint rhubarb. 1 cup sugar 2 tablespoons flour teaspoon salt Wash rhubarb, cut into -inch pieces. Mix with other ingredients. Line deep pie pan with pie crust. Fill with mixture, being careful not to heap up. Measure pan before mixing ingredients, so that no more may be prepared than pan will hold. May be covered with an upper crust, or barred with narrow strips of crust, or baked in lower crust only, and meringue added. In this case, 1 or 2 beaten egg yolks are usually mixed with rhubarb.
A plain rhubarb pie of the sort that appears in almost every early twentieth-century American household book: fruit, sugar, a little flour to bind, and a choice of top crust, lattice or meringue. A few of the quantities need judgment from the cook.
- How much rhubarbThe fruit quantity is not stated. A deep 9-inch pie takes roughly 4 cups of cut rhubarb, about 1 1/4 lb trimmed, which suits the 1 cup sugar and 2 tablespoons flour given here. Taste a raw piece: very sour spring rhubarb may want up to 1 1/2 cups sugar.
- Salt and cut sizeThe fraction has dropped out of both the salt and the piece size. A quarter teaspoon of salt is a fair reconstruction, and cutting the stalks into pieces of about 1/2 to 1 inch works well: small enough to cook through, large enough not to collapse to threads.
- Do not peelYoung stalks need no peeling; the red skin carries most of the color. Trim and discard all leaf material — rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid in quantity and are not food. Only the stalk is used.
- ThickeningTwo tablespoons of flour is a light hand by modern standards and gives a loose, juicy filling. If you want a filling that holds a cut slice, use 3 tablespoons flour or 2 tablespoons cornstarch, and let the pie cool completely before cutting.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Start at 425F for 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the juices bubble thickly through the vents. A deep pie on a lower rack, on a sheet pan, avoids a soggy base and a scorched oven floor.
- The meringue versionIf you bake in a lower crust only and top with meringue, the 1 or 2 beaten yolks enrich the filling and help bind the juice; they will not set it like a true custard. Bake the filled shell until the fruit is tender and the juices thickened, then spread meringue made from the whites over the hot filling, sealing it to the crust edge, and brown at 350F for about 12 minutes.
- Measuring the panThe instruction to measure the pan before mixing is sound and worth following. Rhubarb throws a great deal of juice; a heaped pie boils over. Fill level with the rim, no higher.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, six to eight servings.
Rhubarb reached American kitchen gardens as a medicinal plant and became a pie fruit in the nineteenth century largely because it was ready in April, weeks before any tree fruit or berry — hence the old name pieplant. Cookbooks of the period commonly pair it with a generous cup of sugar and a spoonful of flour, since the stalks are both sharply acid and very wet. The three finishes offered here — full top crust, lattice bars, or an open shell with meringue — give the cook a choice, and the meringue version would also use up whites left from the yolks stirred into the filling. The Metropolitan Cook Book was distributed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to policyholders, part of a long campaign of free domestic and nutrition literature aimed at American homes.