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Dessert

Rhubarb Pie or Tart

A pie or tart made with rhubarb, sugar, water, and a light crust, filled 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 Tart

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 1-inch pieces.

  3. Sprinkle a little sugar into a quart basin.

Cook the filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine the rhubarb, sugar, and water.

  2. Simmer gently, shaking the pan often until the rhubarb turns green.

  3. Once cooled, place the rhubarb in a tart dish with just enough syrup to keep it moist.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the mixture with a light crust.

  2. Bake until the crust is golden.

  3. Once baked, quarter the crust.

  4. Fill the tart 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. Rhubarb + sugartop 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
Provides the tart, sour flavour and the bulk of the filling.
Coarse sugar
Sweetens the rhubarb and helps draw out its juices to form a syrup.
Light pie crust
Forms the golden top that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Simmer gently and stop at moist syrup. Rhubarb breaks down quickly under heat, so gentle simmering with frequent shaking keeps the pieces intact. Cooling it with just enough syrup keeps the filling moist without making the pie soggy.

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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