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Dessert

Rhubarb Pie or Tart

A fruit pie made with rhubarb simmered in a sugar syrup and baked in a light crust.

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 pieces about 1 inch long.

  3. Sprinkle a little fine sugar into the basin.

Make the syrup and cook the rhubarb

  1. In a saucepan, boil the sugar in water to create a thin syrup. Skim the syrup.

  2. Add the rhubarb to the syrup.

  3. Simmer gently, shaking the pan often. When the rhubarb turns green, remove it from the heat.

  4. Let the rhubarb cool.

Assemble and bake

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

  2. Bake until the crust is done.

  3. Quarter the crust.

  4. Fill the dish with custard or cream before serving.

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
Provides the tart flavour and the bulk of the pie filling.
Common lump sugar
Sweetens the rhubarb and forms the syrup that keeps the filling moist.
Light pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven as the pie's outer layer.
Custard or cream
Adds richness and a cool, creamy contrast to the tart rhubarb.

The step that matters

Simmering the rhubarb in syrup. Simmering gently and shaking the pan keeps the rhubarb pieces whole and evenly cooked. Boiling hard would break them down into mush, and removing the pan from the heat once the rhubarb turns green stops it from overcooking.

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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