Some years ago I was lucky enough to discover that the
mistress of the real house that I use in the Orchard Mysteries, Olive Barton
Warner (a distant relation), kept a diary for many years. The annual books are
all in the local historical society, but I had a chance to copy two of them,
including the earliest, written in 1880.
It’s a simple record of what the family (husband Eugene and
daughters Lula and Nettie) did each day on a farm (110 acres) in western Massachusetts. The
entries are short and matter-of-fact, but they provide some wonderful insights
into nineteenth century life (although husband Eugene usually gets only a line
or two).
The earliest volume reports that on Thursday,
April 29th, 1880, the girls picked the first greens of the season, and Olive
made two rhubarb pies, as well as a batch of raised doughnuts and a loaf of
gingerbread and four other pies (she did a lot
of baking! But alas, no recipes).
I thought it would be nice to honor her at this time of
year, when Massachusetts fruits and vegetables are just coming to market. But I had to
look up exactly what Olive might have planted that would be ready to harvest in April and May. Luckily I found a
useful listing of seasonal vegetables in Massachusetts online. Here they are:
arugula, asparagus, chard, fiddlehead ferns (I did give a recipe here for
those—they’re available only for a short time each year), lettuce, nettles, new
potatoes, parsley, pea greens, radishes, rhubarb, scallions, spinach, and
thyme.
I don’t know what the weather was like in western
Massachusetts in May of 1880, but it’s too chilly around here at the moment to think about
making salads, even with fresh lettuce and such. That leaves me with . . . rhubarb, which Olive mentioned. Would
you believe I have never cooked with rhubarb? But I guess it’s time to try. I
looked through my cookbooks and came up with few recipes (although a lot of apple recipes
suggest swapping out the apples and using rhubarb instead), and most of the
cookbooks were later than Olive’s era. Then I remembered I had come upon an online collection of recipes from precisely that period, compiled from a Connecticut
newspaper, and there was a recipe for baked apple pudding (and no rhubarb
recipes!). So here is an authentic period recipe but with a bit of tweaking.
This is for you, Olive.
Baked Rhubarb Pudding
Ingredients:
3 cups of stewed rhubarb
1/4 pound (1 stick) of butter
sugar “to taste”
six eggs, well beaten
six crackers, pounded and sifted
To stew your rhubarb: Dice the rhubarb.
Cook in a saucepan over
low heat with 3/4 cup sugar until soft (you might need to add a little water in
the beginning to get things started).
When the rhubarb is well stewed but still hot, stir in half
the butter (1/2 stick). Taste for sweetness and add additional sugar if needed.
Let the mixture cool.
Beat the eggs, and add to the cold rhubarb mixture. Beat
well.
Pound and sift six crackers. (Note: I have no idea what crackers were available in 1881. Soda
crackers? Saltines? Carr’s Table Water Biscuits? I bought three modern kinds
and ground them up. The water biscuits (left) came the closest, I think.)
Butter a baking dish. Put in a layer of crackers, then a
layer of rhubarb. Repeat until your dish is filled, ending with a cracker
layer. Dot the top with bits of the remaining butter (yes, half a stick). Bake
for half an hour.
The original recipe didn’t happen to mention a baking
temperature, probably because nobody had a thermostat back then. I guessed 350 degrees, or a medium setting.
It seems to have worked, because the custard set up nicely
and the top was lightly browned (with a lot of butter still on the surface).
And I’ve discovered that rhubarb tastes better than I expected.
What about you? Do you cook with rhubarb? Do you have any
favorite recipes for it?
A Late Frost, the 11th Orchard Mystery, will be released in November.
The story takes place just a bit too early for any new fruits or vegetables to have appeared in Massachusetts, but plenty of apple varieties keep well over the winter if you keep them cool, so they're available for pies.
www.sheilaconnolly.com
