Pieplant Pie
Wash the pieplant and cut in pieces half an inch long. Put it in a saucepan, cover with cold water, heat to a boiling point, then drain. To two cupfuls of the drained pieplant add one cupful of sugar with which a tablespoonful of flour has been mixed. Roll out the under crust, fit it to the pie pan, and fill with the prepared plant. Cover with a layer of paste, make an incision for the escape of steam and bake until the crust is brown and crisp.
A plain two-crust rhubarb pie from an era when the plant was called pieplant because that is nearly all anyone did with it. The book gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- Pieplant is rhubarbThe name persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth in American cookbooks. Use the stalks only; the leaves contain enough oxalic acid to be genuinely poisonous and should go straight in the bin.
- The blanch is the pointCovering with cold water, bringing to a boil and draining pulls out a good deal of the harsh acidity and the excess liquid that makes rhubarb pies weep. Drain thoroughly and let it sit a few minutes in the colander before measuring the two cupfuls.
- Oven temperatureStart at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and brown the bottom crust, then drop to 350F for a further 30 to 40 minutes. "Until the crust is brown and crisp" was written for a cook who judged by eye and a wood range that ran hot at first and cooled steadily.
- Flour as thickenerOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of fruit is light by modern standards, but the pre-boiling and draining removes most of the juice this pie would otherwise have to cope with. If you skip the blanching step, you will need three tablespoons of flour or two of cornstarch.
- SugarOne cup to two cups of drained rhubarb reads sweet, and it is; the blanching has already taken the edge off. Three-quarters of a cup gives a sharper pie closer to current taste.
- Pastry"Paste" here means pie crust. The recipe assumes you have a standard two-crust quantity to hand, roughly 2 1/2 cups flour to 1 cup fat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or pan size; two cupfuls of drained fruit will fill one shallow 8- or 9-inch pie. Cool at least two hours before cutting or the filling will run.
Rhubarb reached American kitchen gardens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten, and the fleshy stalks were treated as a fruit only once cheap sugar made them palatable. Pieplant was a common American name for the plant, reflecting how closely it had come to be identified with a single use. It was also among the first things in the garden worth picking, coming up ahead of berries, which is why rhubarb pie carried a particular seasonal weight in northern households. The instruction to parboil and drain is common in books of this period.