Rhubarb, or Pie-Plant Pudding

The White House Cookbook: A Selection of Choice Recipes Original and Selected, During a Period of Forty Years' Practical Housekeeping, by Fanny Lamira Gillette, [1887]

IN presenting this book of recipes to the public, I do so at the urgent request of friends and relatives. During forty years of practical housekeeping, it has been my custom, after trying and testing a recipe, and finding it invariably a success, and also one of the best of its kind, to copy it in a book, thereby accumulating a considerable amount of reliable and useful information in the culinary line.

Rhubarb, or Pie-Plant Pudding
Chop rhubarb pretty fine, put in a pudding-dish, and sprinkle sugar over it; make a batter of one cupful of sour milk*, two eggs, a piece of butter the size of an egg, half a teaspoonful of soda, and enough flour to make batter about as thick as for cake. Spread it over the rhubarb, and bake till done. Turn out on a platter upside down, so that the rhubarb will be on top. Serve with sugar and cream.


Verdict:

Another name for rhubarb is "pie-plant", because of rhubarb's excellence in pie making. I think this is outstanding. Any produce so intimately connected with the manufacture of pie can only be a source of good in the world.

This was quite tasty! Kind of like a rhubarb upside-down cake, except that the cakey bit wasn't sweetened. That was all right, because the sweetened rhubarb made it just sweet enough. That, and the cream and sugar on top. I would have just drizzled the cream on, but I've got all this unsweetened whipped cream in my fridge from a failed butter-making attempt.** Besides being tasty, it was also quick and easy to make. Consequently, I'll probably be making it again some time. Next time, though, I shall add a little bit of sugar to the batter, some vanilla, and some nutmeg. Mmm. Delightful.

This is a great recipe to practice on if imprecise recipes make you nervous.



*For every cup of milk, add about 1 tsp. of lemon juice or vinegar and stir it around. If you lived in the days before pasteurization, you'd be drinking milk that gradually soured due to bacterial formation. Pasteurized milk does not do this. It just goes nasty. The reason for using sour milk instead of fresh milk is not economy; it is cleverness! You need some acidity to react with the baking soda to leaven the batter, making your end result light and fluffy instead of dense and brick-like. This is why you must add acid in the form of lemon juice or vinegar to achieve the same result.

**Remember this post on butter-making? It is much easier with a stand mixer in a room-temperature house than on a chilly day in 1917 with a hand-cranked churn.