Plain and Simple Rhubarb Cake

From the garden, Tasty treats
By

SAM_1237

The most popular conveyance for rhubarb seems to be cake. This week and next, we’ll treat ourselves to a couple of versions of rhubarb cake. This week’s is simple, gently flavored, nothing fancy on top, and it swallows up its rhubarb sweetly leaving only a small trace behind. Fresh out of the oven, the top has a very pleasant crustiness. The recipe came to me from an island summer neighbor, Bev Rogers, who acquired it in her travels from Olga Semelbauer, “an older German neighbor who shared this at Kaffe Klatches.”

It certainly would successfully accompany a cup of coffee or work as breakfast cake, but we ate it for dessert. I didn’t even bother to drop some whipped cream or ice cream on it to dress it up a bit and make it seem more dessert-like.

It’s very easy to make. The recipe calls for a cup and a half of sugar and says to use part brown sugar and part white. I divided it down the middle with three-quarters cup of each. These days, unless you buy milk straight from a farm, your milk is pasteurized and homogenized and rots instead of souring naturally and usefully. Sour milk for baking is easily produced by introducing a tablespoon of vinegar to a cup of regular milk. I actually used buttermilk and that worked fine.

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Olga’s Rhubarb Cake
 
Ingredients
  • 2 cups of finely diced rhubarb
  • ½ cup white sugar
  • ½ cup butter or other shortening
  • 1 ½ cups sugar (part white and part brown)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • dash of salt
  • 1 cup sour milk
Instructions
  1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Grease and flour a nine-by-thirteen pan.
  3. Mix together the rhubarb and half cup of sugar and set aside while you mix the batter
  4. Cream together the butter or shortening and sugars.
  5. Add and beat in the egg and vanilla.
  6. Sift together the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt.
  7. Add the dry ingredients alternately with the sour milk, mixing well after each addition.
  8. Fold in the rhubarb and sugar mixture.
  9. Bake for an hour, testing after the first fifty minutes. When the top is firm, and an inserted tester comes out clean it is done.
  10. Serve warm with or without whipped cream.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.