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Dessert

Rhubarb Pie or Tar T

A sweet rhubarb filling baked in a light pie crust, served with custard or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Rhubarb Pie or Tar T

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rhubarb

  1. Remove the leaves from the rhubarb stalks and peel off the thin skin.

  2. Cut the rhubarb into pieces about 1 inch long and sprinkle a little fine sugar into the basin.

Make the syrup and cook the rhubarb

  1. In a saucepan, boil 1 lb of sugar in ½ pint of water to create a thin syrup.

  2. Skim the syrup, then add the rhubarb and simmer gently, shaking the pan often.

  3. Cook until the rhubarb turns green, then remove from heat and let it cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the rhubarb in a tart dish with just enough syrup to keep it moist.

  2. Cover with a light pie crust and bake until the crust is done.

  3. Once baked, quarter the crust and fill the dish with custard or cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Rhubarb + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Sugar + rhubarbtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb
Forms the filling; its tartness provides the main flavour of the pie.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart rhubarb and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that keeps it moist.
Light pie crust
Covers the fruit and bakes into a crisp, golden top layer.

The step that matters

Cooking the rhubarb in the syrup. Simmering gently and shaking the pan keeps the rhubarb pieces whole. Boiling hard would break them down into a mush, and the rhubarb should be cooked only until it changes colour and softens slightly.

Swap the rhubarb

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Rhubarbthe original
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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