Rhubarb pie -- and Mordaunt
4 April 2025 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeNB Mordaunt (the son of Milady by her second husband) in Twenty Years After is played by the Count of Monte Cristo :-D
(a.k.a. Viktor Avilov, evidently making the most of his sinister looks)
I recognised him almost immediately, whereas I'm not sure I should necessarily have recognised d'Artagnan playing Fernand (a.k.a. Mikhail Boyarsky) if I hadn't been primed to await his appearance!
I had yet another go at the 1920s rhubarb pie that I keep optimistically attempting, and this time I made a full-size one with three sticks of rhubarb and a whole egg, but only the juice of a tiny bargain lemon (about the size of a lime: they were on special offer, and since I mainly use them for salad dressing it seemed a good home for fruit that would otherwise be wasted due to being 'sub-standard'). But I really do think the baking instructions on this one must be wrong.
It tells you to bake in a quick oven for half an hour, and since I already had the oven lit for my first course I was able to do so fairly easily. But after half an hour the pastry might have been set, but there was liquid butter bubbling golden out of the steam-slits in the top, so the inside very clearly wasn't ready. I gave it another ten minutes... and then another five... and then another seven... and after nearly an hour in the oven the liquid bubbling in the slits was looking a little more sauce-like and a little less like pure butter, so I took the pie out and cut into it. As expected it was of course completely liquid inside, as I have learned to expect from this recipe, but the juices do make a tasty sauce.
But this time round the actual rhubarb was still undercooked -- after an hour in the oven! -- presumably due to its having been in some pretty chunky sticks at the point when it went in, even if they were sad and floppy and needed using up. So I ate the portion I'd cut out for myself, only discovering the crunchy rhubarb at the bottom of the bowl, and put the cut pie back in on a low heat (about 100C) for another half-hour or so simply in order to soften the fruit. And when it came out this time the egg/sugar/butter mixture actually *had* set to custard, as I had originally assumed it was intended to do.
So I can only assume that half an hour in a hot oven is simply *not* adequate to cook the filling, even if the amount of lemon juice or egg is cut down; apparently it needs the hot oven to set the pastry followed by a slow oven to set the filling. So now we know....
(It wasn't actually pure butter this time round, which might or might not have been significant; in my periodic check on the margarine shelves I discovered that there actually *was* a margarine product that was made of local vegetable oil instead of the ubiquitous cheap (and destructive) imported palm oil, just as they all used to be back before palm oil got pushed as the next big industry ingredient. Flora has rebranded itself as "now free from palm oil" and "made with natural ingredients" (the two are not in any way synonymous; palm oil *is* natural, just as organic food contains 'minerals'!) and I felt it deserved to be rewarded for the effort, so I bought some. I was also motivated, I confess, by the fact that the sole (very old) margarine tub which fits onto my narrow kitchen windowsill has become so ancient that its plastic is now photo-degrading and crumbles beneath my fingers when I try to pick it up, and the small Flora tubs are neatly the same size :-p
Anyway, I always did buy margarine for general baking and butter just for flavour, and using butter for everything is extremely expensive (although probably good in motivating me to limit my consumption of baked goods!) So I have been using it for cooking and have nearly finished the small tub; the disadavantage, of course, is that if you keep buying it you keep *on* building up more tubs and creating more plastic waste. In terms of cooking, however, I can't tell the difference. I put about half butter and half marge into the pie filling, and it was very flavoursome.
Flora is not cheap, as margarine goes; but it is about half the price of butter even so! The call it 'Flora Original', but presumably 'original' is not a description that can be policed by the Trading Standards Authority, because I happen to remember that it used to be simply a basic sunflower oil spread, cheap and cheerful -- and Wikipedia confirms this :-p
And of course it is also an ultra-processed food -- and the supermarket happened to be having a special offer on lard at 15p a (7oz) packet, which is far cheaper and keeps pretty much indefinitely. So I considered buying a second tub of Flora but bought two packets of lard instead... and made the pastry for the rhubarb pie with 3oz lard (plus 2oz oatmeal), while using 1oz butter and 1oz margarine for the sweet filling ;-) I also fried a batch of potato floddies in a little lard instead of (expensive) dripping, and they were as tasty as usual.
(a.k.a. Viktor Avilov, evidently making the most of his sinister looks)
I recognised him almost immediately, whereas I'm not sure I should necessarily have recognised d'Artagnan playing Fernand (a.k.a. Mikhail Boyarsky) if I hadn't been primed to await his appearance!
I had yet another go at the 1920s rhubarb pie that I keep optimistically attempting, and this time I made a full-size one with three sticks of rhubarb and a whole egg, but only the juice of a tiny bargain lemon (about the size of a lime: they were on special offer, and since I mainly use them for salad dressing it seemed a good home for fruit that would otherwise be wasted due to being 'sub-standard'). But I really do think the baking instructions on this one must be wrong.
It tells you to bake in a quick oven for half an hour, and since I already had the oven lit for my first course I was able to do so fairly easily. But after half an hour the pastry might have been set, but there was liquid butter bubbling golden out of the steam-slits in the top, so the inside very clearly wasn't ready. I gave it another ten minutes... and then another five... and then another seven... and after nearly an hour in the oven the liquid bubbling in the slits was looking a little more sauce-like and a little less like pure butter, so I took the pie out and cut into it. As expected it was of course completely liquid inside, as I have learned to expect from this recipe, but the juices do make a tasty sauce.
But this time round the actual rhubarb was still undercooked -- after an hour in the oven! -- presumably due to its having been in some pretty chunky sticks at the point when it went in, even if they were sad and floppy and needed using up. So I ate the portion I'd cut out for myself, only discovering the crunchy rhubarb at the bottom of the bowl, and put the cut pie back in on a low heat (about 100C) for another half-hour or so simply in order to soften the fruit. And when it came out this time the egg/sugar/butter mixture actually *had* set to custard, as I had originally assumed it was intended to do.
So I can only assume that half an hour in a hot oven is simply *not* adequate to cook the filling, even if the amount of lemon juice or egg is cut down; apparently it needs the hot oven to set the pastry followed by a slow oven to set the filling. So now we know....
(It wasn't actually pure butter this time round, which might or might not have been significant; in my periodic check on the margarine shelves I discovered that there actually *was* a margarine product that was made of local vegetable oil instead of the ubiquitous cheap (and destructive) imported palm oil, just as they all used to be back before palm oil got pushed as the next big industry ingredient. Flora has rebranded itself as "now free from palm oil" and "made with natural ingredients" (the two are not in any way synonymous; palm oil *is* natural, just as organic food contains 'minerals'!) and I felt it deserved to be rewarded for the effort, so I bought some. I was also motivated, I confess, by the fact that the sole (very old) margarine tub which fits onto my narrow kitchen windowsill has become so ancient that its plastic is now photo-degrading and crumbles beneath my fingers when I try to pick it up, and the small Flora tubs are neatly the same size :-p
Anyway, I always did buy margarine for general baking and butter just for flavour, and using butter for everything is extremely expensive (although probably good in motivating me to limit my consumption of baked goods!) So I have been using it for cooking and have nearly finished the small tub; the disadavantage, of course, is that if you keep buying it you keep *on* building up more tubs and creating more plastic waste. In terms of cooking, however, I can't tell the difference. I put about half butter and half marge into the pie filling, and it was very flavoursome.
Flora is not cheap, as margarine goes; but it is about half the price of butter even so! The call it 'Flora Original', but presumably 'original' is not a description that can be policed by the Trading Standards Authority, because I happen to remember that it used to be simply a basic sunflower oil spread, cheap and cheerful -- and Wikipedia confirms this :-p
And of course it is also an ultra-processed food -- and the supermarket happened to be having a special offer on lard at 15p a (7oz) packet, which is far cheaper and keeps pretty much indefinitely. So I considered buying a second tub of Flora but bought two packets of lard instead... and made the pastry for the rhubarb pie with 3oz lard (plus 2oz oatmeal), while using 1oz butter and 1oz margarine for the sweet filling ;-) I also fried a batch of potato floddies in a little lard instead of (expensive) dripping, and they were as tasty as usual.