Spring Memories from the Recipe Box

I married into a rhubarb-loving family. Large, well-tended plants produced a bountiful crop each spring/summer in the southern corner of the property, out the back door of the red-block farmhouse where both my husband and his dad grew up. The tangy fruit made its way into a variety of dishes—stewed rhubarb, rhubarb crisp, various pies and even rhubarb juice that served as the main beverage at my brother-in-law’s wedding.

The health, longevity, and production capabilities of these rhubarb plants were attributed to my mother-in-law’s strict harvesting procedures that included the correct wrist motion to snap the stalks loose from the plant. Decades later, after the farm had been sold, when my mother-in-law moved into the small house behind our big house, can you guess the first thing she insisted on planting? Three rhubarb plants that soon produced a nice crop. Never quite to the amount or high quality of the farm-grown crop (so I was told) but sufficient to supply fruit for the traditional desserts.

Every day or two, she’d pick the just-ripe stalks and place small baggies of the chopped fruit in the freezer. One day in late June, when she saw me out her kitchen window heading toward the rhubarb, she called out, “You’re not going to pick rhubarb, are you?” That had been my intention, yes. She declared that it was too late in the season to be picking rhubarb. Rhubarb that looked perfectly pickable to me. I did not pick rhubarb that day. Or the next.

My rhubarb crisp with a double portion of the crumb topping—because I find rhubarb to be a bit tart for my liking—always got a thumbs up from hubby. Occasionally, I’d make a rhubarb cream or strawberry rhubarb pie, garnering two thumbs up. But because the recipe seemed so vague and not that appealing to me, I resisted making my husband’s grandma’s Rhubarb Family Pie in spite of his insistence that it represented the best in rhubarb eating.

About five years ago, I decided to give it a go. Let’s just say, we did not share, as I’d hoped to, with the neighbors who remembered dear ol’ Grandma’s special rhubarb pie. A couple of weeks later, Family Pie round two ended with success, garnering praise from both hubby and the neighbors, thanks to additional sugar.

Don’t you just love the less-than-thorough instructions so common in old recipes? Challenging, indeed. But I’m so glad I finally took the plunge. Ditto for my husband and his sisters and the neighbors.

Rhubarb Family Pie

     – as shared by Emilia (Habegger) Steury with notes added by Audrey (Bleeck) Steury (in parenthesis & underlined) and notes added by Beth (Hammitt) Steury (ME) in italics

Line deep pan with pastry, put rhubarb. Put 7 heaping tablespoons sugar on rhubarb.

I used a 10 in. deep dish pie plate; added approx. 3 cups of chopped small rhubarb; added 8 measuring tablespoons of sugar with an emphasis on “heaping.”

Make custard with:

            2 rounded tablespoons flour

            2 rounded tablespoons sugar  —  heaping tablespoons

            1 egg

            Enough milk to fill the pie  (1 ½ cups milk)   

I mixed the flour and sugar; added the egg to 1 c. milk; whisked the flour/sugar mixture into the egg/milk mixture. Poured this over the rhubarb then gradually added approx. ½ c. additional milk.

Then spread bread with butter and put on top.

Hubby noted the “bread” was heavily buttered 2-3 slices of bread cut into 6-8 pieces each, placed side-by-side to cover the filling. A VERY important step omitted in the original recipe: SPRINKLE buttered bread pieces with sugar. 

Bake for 10 minutes in 450 degree oven and then turn it down to 400 and bake till done.  

 (I baked in 375° oven.)  I baked 10 minutes at 450° and 30-35 minutes at 375°.

Enjoy this family favorite all year round using chopped, frozen rhubarb.