RHUBARB. It’s a funny old word, isn’t it? For a funny old vegetable.
Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. It’s the word actors use to make fake conversation. And it is, of course, a fake fruit.
Living as we do in West Yorkshire, we have a proud rhubarb heritage, dating back to the 19th century when some clever dick discovered that forcing the stems to grow in darkness made them pink, tender and much more palatable than the sort that springs up unencouraged in my back garden.
In Huddersfield we live close to the mystical ‘rhubarb triangle’, where forcing still goes on today.
Rhubarb – a derivation of the middle English reubarb and Medieval Latin reubarbanum (barbarian plant from the River Volga, whose banks were awash with rhubarb) – is enjoying something of an unexpected renaissance. I say unexpected because this is a foodstuff that barely deserves the title of food. It’s only redeeming quality, I sometimes think, is that it grows like a weed and is untroubled by pests or indifferent gardening techniques. If you actually want to grow it then it will be absolutely no trouble at all. In fact the problem is getting rid of it.
I was given a carrier bag containing a small portion of rhubarb root by a colleague several years ago. He said it was ‘cherry rhubarb’ and led me to believe that it would produce stems of unrivalled fruit-like sweetness.
Despite leaving the carrier bag in the office for a week and then planting it out during a drought, the root flourished so much that we had to dig it out of the allotment a couple of years later and transplant it into a neglected corner of the garden. I suspect that many species of Rheum – its Latin name – are consigned to neglected corners, but it makes no difference, because this is a plant that enjoys being left alone to do its own thing. Given a free hand it will take over your neglected corner, and more.
Every year our rhubarb rewards us, as if we had nurtured it, by producing a forest of umbrella-like leaves and enough stems to make a 1950’s school dinner rhubarb crumble every day for the whole of the spring and early summer. It does not taste like cherries.
We have tried forcing it with a bucket to improve the flavour but every time I inspect the spindly, anaemic stems I feel as if we’re somehow being cruel and give it an afternoon of sunshine. The Man thinks I’m mad.
Early in the season I did attempt to cook a few stems to make a filling for a sponge pudding. It would have been a better with cherries. No-one seemed interested in that old British stand-by rhubarb and custard. Since then the rhubarb has been allowed to run amok unmolested.
Trendy restaurants enjoy introducing rhubarb dishes at this time of year but, I have noticed, that they use only token amounts of this bitter vegetable. And I don’t know of anyone who actually buys the stuff from supermarkets. But clearly, someone does or the ‘Rhubarb Triangle’ would not still be in business.
In the 19th century, rhubarb was imported and grown as a medicine and had a higher monetary value than opium, because it was vastly expensive to import all the way from China and other far flung places.
Rhubarb originated in Siberia, which is why it finds itself so at home in the British climate I guess, and was used by the Chinese for thousands of years as a purgative. The roots were also popular in medieval medicine here. Modern science has shown that it contains a substance that reduces blood sugar levels. It’s probably bad science to say that sour rhubarb has found a way of balancing up the amount of sugar needed to make it palatable, but it’s an interesting thought.
Only two things are commonly known about rhubarb: one is that it has a metallic bitter taste and the other is that the leaves are poisonous. In fact, the leaves are not that toxic and it has been estimated you’d have to eat 5kg of the leaves to approach a lethal dose of its poisons, one of which is kidney-damaging oxalic acid.
I think we can all agree that you would have to be some sort of extreme masochist to eat even 5kgs of the stems, never mind the leaves, so rhubarb poisoning is probably as rare as fabulous puddings containing rhubarb.
But if you know differently I stand to be corrected on both counts.
