Fresh Rhubarb Pie

8  cups  chopped rhubarb
1-3/4  cups  sugar
10  Tbs  flour
2  Tbs  butter
1  (9 -10 inch)  double crust pastry

Preheat oven to 450°.
Cut the rhubarb into ½” thick slices. Combine sugar and flour. Sprinkle 1/4 of this mixture over the pastry in pie plate. Heap rhubarb over this mixture. Sprinkle with the remaining sugar and flour.

Dot with small pieces of butter. Cover with top crust: sprinkle a little sugar over the crust.

Place pie on lowest rack in oven. Bake for 15 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350° and continue baking for 45-60 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

DO NOT mix the flour and sugar mixture with the fruit before adding to the pie shell. The reason you want copious amounts of sugar both on the bottom and on the top of the fruit (rather than mixed in) is that while baking, the bubbling-hot sugar caramelizes in contact with the crusts, 
a process which makes the crusts rather crispy in the final product. This is what really sets this pie off. If you mix the sugar up with the fruit, you don’t get that crispy crust. The sugar makes its way through the fruit, so you won’t have parts of the pie too sweet and other parts tart.

This may seem like a lot of sugar, but it really isn’t, unless, of course, you prefer a tart rhubarb pie. Then you might decrease the sugar by ¼ cup, but this pie is not overly sweet at all.