I originally learned this favorite recipe, Rhubarb Pie a la Joy, from the cookbook The Joy of Cooking that my father gave to me as a newlywed in 1988. Dad was a pretty good weekend cook himself and knew that this classic cookbook was just what I needed. The Joy of Cooking was first published in 1936 and has stood the test of time with ageless recipes for family-style cooking. Few foods are more native to the American palate than a classic fruit pie. And this is one of them. One of the best pie recipes in the book is Rhubarb Pie a la Joy. It is amazingly tangy and is complemented by Food for the Ages’ flaky homemade pie crust.
Rhubarb is a vegetable, and although you can eat its stalks, its green leaves are actually poisonous! Once the large, umbrella-shaped leaves are removed, the sturdy crimson stalks are washed, cut into small pieces, coated with sugar, a bit of orange rind, some flour and a bit of butter and cooked to perfection. This pie pairs beautifully with a boiled custard or, like most fruit pies, with vanilla ice cream.
Rhubarb In Your Garden – The Gift That Keeps on Giving!
Since it’s one of the first plants that comes up in the spring, and grows just about anywhere (unlike most true fruits that favor warmer weather and lower altitudes), rhubarb is always the first pie that I bake after a long, cold winter. And if you have a rhubarb plant in the garden, you can keep growing stalks and making pies all summer, as long as you remove its seedhead every so often. The summer stalks can be tougher but still usable!
Here is my video of making the filling and rolling out the crust:
Rhubarb Pie a la Joy
Total time: 1.5 hours, including cooking time. Serves 8
Ingredients
- 6 cups unpeeled, diced young rhubarb stalks
- 1/2 cup flour
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 1/2 tablespoons butter
- 1 1/2 teaspoons orange rind
- 2 tablespoons milk for crust
- Sparkling sugar to sprinkle on top
Directions
- Preheat oven to 450⁰F. Combine all filling ingredients in a large bowl and set aside. Prepare a pie crust. Here is FFA’s recipe for pie crust.
- Select a large, deep-dish pie plate. After resting the pie dough for at least a half hour, roll out pie crust and place in the bottom of the pie plate.
- Pour rhubarb mixture in a large deep-dish pie plate and dot with but ter.
- Roll out top crust and place on top of pie. (You can make this pie with a lattice crust to make it look even cuter.)Fold top edge of crust under bottom crust and pinch as you like. Make a slit in the center of the top crust to release steam.
- Paint top of crust with milk then sprinkle a bit of sugar on the top of the pie then place it in a pre-heated oven on middle rack. Let cook for 10 minutes then lower the temperature to 350⁰F and cook another 40 minutes. Make sure that the center is bubbling before you remove from oven and let cool 10 minutes before serving with vanilla ice cream.
Sarah Patton, friend and baker at Baking Bedlamite, tried out the recipe Rhubarb Pie – A la Joy using her green rhubarb plant that grows in her back yard in Geneva, Switzerland.
Ooooooh… looks fabulous! I love the six crust pie recipe too! Very practical. Have to investigate the rhubarb bush. It’s huge but none of the stalks are turning red!
You will love the pie crust, Sarah, and my theory is if you are going to the trouble to make one, why not make six, right?! There are types of rhubarb, the sweeter, more tender rhubarb, that don’t turn crimson but are more delicate and just as delicious than the huge red ones in our local grocery store. Maybe you have that type! From Wikipedia: “The color of rhubarb stalks can vary from the commonly associated crimson red, through speckled light pink, to simply light green. Rhubarb stalks are poetically described as “crimson stalks”. The color results from the presence of anthocyanins, and varies according to both rhubarb variety and production technique. The color is not related to its suitability for cooking:[8] The green-stalked rhubarb is more robust and has a higher yield, but the red-coloured stalks are much more popular with consumers.”
This was really a popular veggie-treated-as-fruit-in-pie, a.k.a., the “pie fruit” in the inter-war period so it’s no wonder people our parents’ age love rhubarb.
Wikkipedia knows all! I’ve tasted the green stalks from the bush in my backyard and actually they seem fine – maybe not as sour even as the red kind. Am glad you looked it up – I guess I’ve been worried that they’re somehow poisonous but makes sense that it’s just another variety. Will feed it to the dog first to be sure.
LOL–the Beefeater doggie! Just don’t feed him the leaves, they are the poisonous part, though I think you need to eat at least 5 kg to poison yourself with rhubarb leaves.