Love Bites: Marital Skirmishes in the Kitchen. Christopher Hirst
but it collapses into a pink, stringy mush in a pie.’
Her antipathy is supported by one of Britain’s greatest food writers. ‘Nanny food,’ Jane Grigson seethed in her Fruit Book. ‘Governess food. School-meal food.’ In case we haven’t got the message, she went on: ‘I haven’t got over disliking rhubarb, and disliking it still more for being often not so young and a little stringy…Only young pink rhubarb is worth eating.’
Though expounded by two of my favourite authorities, Mrs G and Mrs H, I strongly disagree with this view. We almost always used mature stalks in the most memorable dessert of my childhood. Though somewhat bulkier than Proust’s madeleine, a rhubarb pie has the same effect on me. Its combination of bittersweet, tooth-etching filling and juice-infused pastry instantly whisks me back to the West Riding of Yorkshire circa 1962. I grew up near the legendary Rhubarb Triangle between Leeds, Wakefield and Morley. Or is it Bradford? Opinions vary about the location of this locale, almost as mysterious as its Bermudan counterpart, but we certainly had several rhubarb plants in the garden of our house in Cleckheaton. In consequence, I ate a lot of rhubarb as a child – almost always in pie form, very occasionally stewed, never under the crunchy awning of a crumble.
If Mrs H was a non-starter in the Rhubarb Pie Appreciation League, I found a more willing recipient in the form of Mrs H’s mother. If she was surprised when her daughter’s live-in boyfriend started serving her rhubarb pie on a regular basis, she did not express it to me. Admittedly, my Proustian pud did not whisk her back to a Yorkshire childhood, but this was scarcely surprising since she came from Surbiton, Surrey.
IN HIS BOOK Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug, Clifford Foust, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, explains ‘the several advantages’ of my home turf of West Yorkshire as the perfect terroir for rhubarb. It had ‘a climate northerly enough for a lengthy autumn dormancy period’ and ‘high rainfall for maximum plant development’. The ‘smoky and polluted atmosphere’ helped ‘induce early and full dormancy…for early forcing’ and ‘urban sludge’ provided plentiful fertiliser. No wonder I have rhubarb juice in my veins.
Perhaps the first dish I ever made for myself was chunks of raw rhubarb dipped in sugar. Half a century ago in the West Riding of Yorkshire, we would have been mystified by Jane Grigson’s insistence on ‘only pink young rhubarb’. This is a ‘forced’ winter crop grown in large, dark sheds. It tastes great, but why limit yourself to this etiolated stuff when outdoor rhubarb continues to delight the palate throughout summer? Unless you use telegraph-pole-sized rhubarb, you need not fear stringiness. And what if there is a suggestion of the fibrous? Is that going to kill you?
The pie I made as a treat for Mrs H’s mother was equipped with a pastry floor, walls and roof, because that’s the kind of pie my mother made. I still feel short-changed if I receive a pie, whether sweet or savoury, where the pastry consists only of a lid. Unlike my mother, I cheated by using ready-made pastry, shortcrust because that’s what I grew up with, though puff, which Mrs H prefers, is also OK. Either way, a highlight of the pie is the sweetened pink rhubarb juice soaking into the pie floor. You don’t get that with rhubarb crumble.
After rolling out the pastry, I used the majority of it to line a large dish. I chopped the rhubarb stalks into cubes and put them into the pie. I then added sugar (a 5:3 ratio of rhubarb to sugar is about right) and installed the roof. As Mrs H points out, it usually required a certain amount of patching. After sealing the joints by pinching, I brushed it with milk and slashed three holes for steam-release as I’d seen my mother do hundreds of times. Emerging from the oven, the pastry patchwork had, I thought, a fine manly vigour. Lumps of rhubarb were visible through the three crevasses.
‘Just a small slice for me,’ said Mrs H’s mum.
While she nibbled, I enlightened her about the mysterious story of rhubarb. For exoticism, its etymology beats everything else in the larder. The ‘rhu’ bit derives from Rha, the Greek name for the River Volga, where the plant was transported, while ‘barb’ comes from the Latin barbarus (meaning ‘foreign’, ‘strange’ and, ironically, ‘uncultivated’). This, in turn, came from a Greek onomatopoeic coinage because barbarian speech sounded like ‘Ba, ba, ba’. The ‘rhubarbing’ of film extras is an unconscious return to the plant’s distant origins. It was possibly first cultivated in Mongolia by the Tartar tribes of the Gobi Desert. We don’t know if anyone told Genghis Khan that rhubarb was nanny food.
‘Fancy that,’ said Mrs H’s mum. ‘It was lovely, but I won’t have another slice, thank you.’
At our next meeting, I produced another monumental construction. ‘I’ve made you a rhubarb pie,’ I announced, a trifle superfluously, as I cut her a chunk.
‘Oh, lovely.’
‘Did you know that we all come from rhubarb?’
‘Really, dear?’
The Zoroastrians, I explained, believed that ‘the human race was born of the rhubarb plant’. I gleaned this insight from The Legendary Cuisine of Of Persia by Margaret Shaida, who notes that reevâs, the Persian name for the plant, comes from a word meaning ‘shining light’. The association came about because ‘from ancient times, rhubarb has been considered good for cleansing the blood and purifying the system’. Until the eighteenth century, rhubarb was mainly used as a laxative in Britain. Only the root was consumed, with Chinese rhubarb being particularly prized for its cathartic properties. A great rarity by the time it reached here, it cost four times as much as opium in medieval times. I once saw some Chinese rhubarb root in the Fernet-Branca factory in Milan. It took the form of large powdery, purple-brown lumps. Along with forty other wonderfully weird ingredients (white agaric, cinchona, aloes, zedoary, myrrh), it is used to enhance the bitterness of this acerbic potion.
The plant’s stalk only became used for culinary purposes with the arrival of Siberian rhubarb in the eighteenth century. Hybrids developed in the nineteenth century combined with the declining price of sugar to make rhubarb a favourite dessert of the Victorians. (You certainly need sugar in rhubarb pie. It’s the oxalic acid in rhubarb that makes it such an interesting food.) The types known as Victoria and Royal Albert were developed by Joseph Myatt, evidently an ardent monarchist, in his market gardens in Deptford and Camberwell (the latter is now a park called Myatt’s Fields), while the imaginatively named Champagne came from a rival grower called Hawkes in nearby Lewisham. The three heroes of Three Men in a Boat (1889) dine off rhubarb pie before setting out on their great adventure. The laxative property of rhubarb continued to be utilised even when the stalks became a foodstuff. In America, rhubarb was known as ‘a broom for the system’.
‘How interesting,’ said Mrs H’s mother. ‘Actually, I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this piece.’
I had no doubt what Mrs H’s mum expected the next time she paid a visit. ‘Guess what I’ve made!’ I said. Hewing a wedge for her, I returned to our favourite topic. ‘Do you know how many cookbooks have been devoted to rhubarb?’ The answer is over 300, mostly produced during the ‘Rhubarb Craze’ that swept Britain and America in the early years of the twentieth century. But for those of us from the Rhubarb Triangle there is one supreme rhubarb dish. Sadly, my dear mother-in-law is no longer around to enjoy my rhubarb pie. At least, I thought she enjoyed it, though her daughter cast doubt on this.
‘It was funny that you always made rhubarb pie when my mother came round.’
‘What do you mean, “funny”?’
‘You never saw her face when you produced your pies.’
‘She enjoyed them!’
‘She was too polite to say she wasn’t very fond of rhubarb.’
In subsequent years, Mrs H has continued this weird familial objection to rhubarb pie, but she grudgingly agreed to indulge my passion by making some other recipes that involve rhubarb. By