How to Make the Perfect Rhubarb and Cream Pie | Felicity Cloake's How to Make the Perfect…

Rhubarb and custard go together like cheese and pickle, or Fanny and Johnnie: whether served in steaming, heavy dollops in the school dining hall or in elegant tartlets in royal kitchens, it's a classic double act. Tart and tangy at the same time, rich and sweet, not to mention the delicious contrast between the juicy crunch of the stalks and the creamy custard, or the striking pairing of bright pink and egg yolk. Basically, it's fun that works on all levels.

The sunny beauty of this pie makes it a great dessert choice for Easter or other holidays this weekend, which is also pretty much your last chance to enjoy forced Yorkshire rhubarb before it's gone for the year later this month. Miss it and you'll have to settle for a bag of boiled rhubarb and custard cream candies. Which is certainly not the worst fate.

Although you can certainly make this recipe with the sturdier, greener outdoor rhubarb, which is seasonal all over the summer, it will be more pleasing to the eye if you can get hold of the forced stuff, which is grown (as consensually as possible with a plant) in dark sheds from December to mid-April, giving it a glorious ruby ​​color and a sweeter flavor. Either way, choose your stems by color and try to make sure they're all about the same thickness.

Several recipes, including those by chefs Gill Meller and Ravneet Gill and even historian Simon Schama in a recipe published in GQ Eats ("the cookbook for men of very good taste"), macerate rhubarb in sugar before cooking, to extract excess liquid and add sweetness. Makes sense if, like the Saveur magazine recipe, you plan to stick it in the raw pie and want to prevent it from dripping water into the custard, but since most recipes I try to cook the rhubarb first, I don't see much point, mainly because I prefer it quite tangy. To that end, I love baker and food writer Edd Kimber's idea in BBC Good Food magazine of adding orange juice to the fruit* to bring out that tangy quality. (Schama sautéed the butter-soaked rhubarb on the griddle, but, as he notes, it's a risky business because "it falls apart quickly," so I'd strongly...