Chop up a bunch of fresh rhubarb stalks. Put in a pan and just cover with filtered water. Simmer gently until rhubarb is completely soft and water is mostly evaporated. It will look similar to apple sauce. Add sugar to taste. Serve over vanilla ice cream.
You didn't mention 'first remove the skin from the stalks'. The skin is where most of the sour and bitter taste comes from, so you will need much less sugar -- much less than half -- if you do this. Tastes better, too. Note that peeled, chopped rhubarb keeps more or less indefinitely in the freezer, and can be used for sauce and pies all year round.
My Grandma's rhubarb sauce recipe: Add sugar until you think you've added too much, then add a little more. (Grandma was born in 1885, for some historical context here.) I'm a little stingier with the sugar.
I live in the famous Rhubarb Triangle. Grown in fields and early crop grown in dark sheds, only lit by candle light when pickers go in. They say they can hear the rhubarb growing. As kids, we'd help ourselves to some field grown stalks which we ate raw after dipping in a paper bag of sugar. A dipping sherbet! wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle Mothers would bake crumbles, chefs use with meat and latest trend is making Gin liquers with it. Taught early to discard leaves too.
Dipped in sugar? How does that taste? Sounds sort of like nature's pixie sticks, although I don't think a bag of sugar would count as nature!
Either way that all sounds very interesting. I haven't heard of cooking it with meat (although I haven't heard much about rhubarb to begin with!). I'll have to look some of that stuff up.
It's taste and feel is much like a juicy, crispy, sour apple, like the ones you bake with. Those need sugar too to make them palatable. There's quite a few savoury recipes, mainly modern era, maybe some old ones - think about Chinese sweet and sour dishes, for example.
You've never tried rhubarb?! There is nothing better than rhubarb pie. Rhubarb/Strawberry pie is overrated. The strawberries are an unequal partner. However there is a combo that might rival the delights of a straight rhubarb pie and that is rhubarb/sour cherry pie. You just substitute sour cherries for any amount less than half of the rhubarb in your recipe. Heaven.
Well I grew up in an Asian household so there's a lot of Western foods I didn't try until I got older. Rhubarb was just one of those things that never came up! But maybe I'll try it some time soon!
I am a big fan of tart stuff during the summer, especially as it gets hotter so tart/sour sounds nice!
Interesting! Growing up we would eat unripen mangoes (they had a bite to them and were very tart) usually by dipping them in a mixture of salt and chilies. It's interesting to see that different cultures appear to pair sour with salt.
I live in Sweden. I grow rhubarb in my back yard. This is a very common thing to do. Rhubarb is available in season in all of the supermarkets. And we grow it all winter in urban 'greenhouses' -- generally repurposed shipping containers -- so that people can eat it in the winter, too.
Your article was the first I had heard that there were any people in the world who thought that rhubarb was poisonous. I asked around. Nobody else around here had heard this, either. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabarber lists the report that English soldiers died in WW2 that you mentioned, and recommends that small children and people who are prone to kidney stones not eat it. (The small children I know around here would strongly disagree, as stewed rhubarb served with milk and cream is a favourite.) They also mention that there are modern cultivars of rhubarb that are much lower in oxalic acid, so perhaps if this ever was a problem, it isn't any more.
Thanks for the insights! Do you commonly eat the leaves of rhubarb? That's generally where the toxin argument comes from, but that's also one of the issues when trying to look up information as many articles may not make a distinction regarding what part of the rhubarb they are actually looking at. The literature regarding children seems to be related to children freely eating rhubarb, although all things considered I'm not sure how often children go searching for rhubarb unlike other berries that may turn out poisonous.
It would be interesting if toxic rhubarb is a thing of the past that lives on more as something that gets passed on but not really justified.
We don't eat the leaves. But I have this filed under 'tastes bad' rather than 'will make you sick' in my mental cabinet. The hares and deer around here also don't eat it, and unlike other perennial plants I grow in my garden I don't have to make any effort to protect the rhubarb plants from the deer in the winter. Common wisdom says that the deer will eat it if the winter is exceptionally cold, but, as you know, common wisdom says a lot of things.
Interesting! The comment about green stalks came from a website (can't remember which) but I'm curious if it was just hearsay. So either the green stalks I saw are due to environmental factors or maybe it was a different variety. The stalks seemed very thin though so either way it may require a good deal of rhubarb to get something eatable.
i tried to find out about the slender stalks... and couldn't.
there were both thick and thin stalks from the same clump.
never payed any attention to exactly where they grew out of after pulling them. or how they grew.
(they would be moved every few years, and i can't remember what the harvest was like after words) thick stalk would be 1 inch the larger way at the root and thin ones 1/2 inch
some plants got fertilizer, some didn't, wasn't specifically fertilizing the rhubarb, nor the apple trees, but the lawn. It also got watered.
all of them were around deciduous trees on the shady side (north) and the leaves weren't picked up in the fall except for around the apple trees. (lawn)
the following website might have some clues.
it does list a variety:
"Livingstone’ (...) harvested once in spring and then again in autumn."
--------------
thin stalks? :
1. A lack of nutrients from the soil. ( in my case, probably not with the movement )
2. If the plant is young or immature. (old roots in my case)
3. Older plants that need to be divided. (maybe)
4. From being harvested incorrectly. (maybe, but why thick ones too? )
5. The stems flowering and going to stem. (typo? seed?) (maybe, i've seen a few that went
In the 1982 cookbook The Foods and Wines of Spain, by the late Penelope Casas, there is a recipe (yes, really) for calves' liver with rhubarb sauce. She explains that, while the dish is made with rhubarb leaves, she has substituted sorrel leaves because in the United States (where the book was published) rhubarb leaves are not eaten, “and, indeed, are considered poisonous”. In my Pennsylvania Dutch family this was held to be true, and I read this article with great interest. Thanks for the research and writing.
Thanks! That's pretty interesting, so I wonder if something did happen at some point in which bad press around rhubarb leaves just happened to make it so that people stayed away from it. Did they recipe call for a lot of rhubarb leaves? Interesting if the recipe was changed just for an American audience as well so it's just modified more American fears.
I have been freeze drying rhubarb, powdering it & then making rhubarb curd (rhubarb curd from fresh is very tasty as well). We had a large rhubarb patch when I was a kid & ate sticks raw, dipped i to a dixie cup full of sugar.
yes it has. its challenging to cook, but my neighbor just served some (cooked, reduced with a tiny bit of spices and sugar) on ice cream, it was to die for.
Chop up a bunch of fresh rhubarb stalks. Put in a pan and just cover with filtered water. Simmer gently until rhubarb is completely soft and water is mostly evaporated. It will look similar to apple sauce. Add sugar to taste. Serve over vanilla ice cream.
You didn't mention 'first remove the skin from the stalks'. The skin is where most of the sour and bitter taste comes from, so you will need much less sugar -- much less than half -- if you do this. Tastes better, too. Note that peeled, chopped rhubarb keeps more or less indefinitely in the freezer, and can be used for sauce and pies all year round.
My Grandma's rhubarb sauce recipe: Add sugar until you think you've added too much, then add a little more. (Grandma was born in 1885, for some historical context here.) I'm a little stingier with the sugar.
Yum!
It tastes like sweet-tarts!
Sounds interesting! How is it over vanilla ice cream? I do like apples and ice cream so this has intrigued me!
Great over vanilla ice cream. Great in a pie served _with_ vanilla ice cream, too.
I live in the famous Rhubarb Triangle. Grown in fields and early crop grown in dark sheds, only lit by candle light when pickers go in. They say they can hear the rhubarb growing. As kids, we'd help ourselves to some field grown stalks which we ate raw after dipping in a paper bag of sugar. A dipping sherbet! wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle Mothers would bake crumbles, chefs use with meat and latest trend is making Gin liquers with it. Taught early to discard leaves too.
Dipped in sugar? How does that taste? Sounds sort of like nature's pixie sticks, although I don't think a bag of sugar would count as nature!
Either way that all sounds very interesting. I haven't heard of cooking it with meat (although I haven't heard much about rhubarb to begin with!). I'll have to look some of that stuff up.
It's taste and feel is much like a juicy, crispy, sour apple, like the ones you bake with. Those need sugar too to make them palatable. There's quite a few savoury recipes, mainly modern era, maybe some old ones - think about Chinese sweet and sour dishes, for example.
Good to know! So it may be good to try it raw first!
You've never tried rhubarb?! There is nothing better than rhubarb pie. Rhubarb/Strawberry pie is overrated. The strawberries are an unequal partner. However there is a combo that might rival the delights of a straight rhubarb pie and that is rhubarb/sour cherry pie. You just substitute sour cherries for any amount less than half of the rhubarb in your recipe. Heaven.
I have to finish picking sour cherries this weekend. I was thinking if a sour cherry / rhubarb crisp
Oooh. With vanilla le cream?
Yes!!
Well I grew up in an Asian household so there's a lot of Western foods I didn't try until I got older. Rhubarb was just one of those things that never came up! But maybe I'll try it some time soon!
I am a big fan of tart stuff during the summer, especially as it gets hotter so tart/sour sounds nice!
As kids we ate it raw, dipping it in salt.
Interesting! Growing up we would eat unripen mangoes (they had a bite to them and were very tart) usually by dipping them in a mixture of salt and chilies. It's interesting to see that different cultures appear to pair sour with salt.
I love mangoes with chili! Now available as a paleta :)
Note that according to
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10157189/
eating rhubarb is _good_ for people who want to reduce creatinine because they have chronic renal failure.
I live in Sweden. I grow rhubarb in my back yard. This is a very common thing to do. Rhubarb is available in season in all of the supermarkets. And we grow it all winter in urban 'greenhouses' -- generally repurposed shipping containers -- so that people can eat it in the winter, too.
Your article was the first I had heard that there were any people in the world who thought that rhubarb was poisonous. I asked around. Nobody else around here had heard this, either. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabarber lists the report that English soldiers died in WW2 that you mentioned, and recommends that small children and people who are prone to kidney stones not eat it. (The small children I know around here would strongly disagree, as stewed rhubarb served with milk and cream is a favourite.) They also mention that there are modern cultivars of rhubarb that are much lower in oxalic acid, so perhaps if this ever was a problem, it isn't any more.
Thanks for the insights! Do you commonly eat the leaves of rhubarb? That's generally where the toxin argument comes from, but that's also one of the issues when trying to look up information as many articles may not make a distinction regarding what part of the rhubarb they are actually looking at. The literature regarding children seems to be related to children freely eating rhubarb, although all things considered I'm not sure how often children go searching for rhubarb unlike other berries that may turn out poisonous.
It would be interesting if toxic rhubarb is a thing of the past that lives on more as something that gets passed on but not really justified.
We don't eat the leaves. But I have this filed under 'tastes bad' rather than 'will make you sick' in my mental cabinet. The hares and deer around here also don't eat it, and unlike other perennial plants I grow in my garden I don't have to make any effort to protect the rhubarb plants from the deer in the winter. Common wisdom says that the deer will eat it if the winter is exceptionally cold, but, as you know, common wisdom says a lot of things.
there are different varieties of rhubarb.
the only one that i have eaten by name is Canada Red, it has a red stalk.
i had access to a few clumps as a kid and ate on it into the fall.
however there are green stalk varieties and i have only eaten those cooked, and i didn't like those as much. some are sweeter than others...
i don't know if it is the soil, or the watering / rain night time temperature had anything to do with the taste... but i think it might.
https://www.rhubarbinfo.com/2019/03/rhubarb-varieties.html
Interesting! The comment about green stalks came from a website (can't remember which) but I'm curious if it was just hearsay. So either the green stalks I saw are due to environmental factors or maybe it was a different variety. The stalks seemed very thin though so either way it may require a good deal of rhubarb to get something eatable.
i tried to find out about the slender stalks... and couldn't.
there were both thick and thin stalks from the same clump.
never payed any attention to exactly where they grew out of after pulling them. or how they grew.
(they would be moved every few years, and i can't remember what the harvest was like after words) thick stalk would be 1 inch the larger way at the root and thin ones 1/2 inch
some plants got fertilizer, some didn't, wasn't specifically fertilizing the rhubarb, nor the apple trees, but the lawn. It also got watered.
all of them were around deciduous trees on the shady side (north) and the leaves weren't picked up in the fall except for around the apple trees. (lawn)
the following website might have some clues.
it does list a variety:
"Livingstone’ (...) harvested once in spring and then again in autumn."
--------------
thin stalks? :
1. A lack of nutrients from the soil. ( in my case, probably not with the movement )
2. If the plant is young or immature. (old roots in my case)
3. Older plants that need to be divided. (maybe)
4. From being harvested incorrectly. (maybe, but why thick ones too? )
5. The stems flowering and going to stem. (typo? seed?) (maybe, i've seen a few that went
to seed. never paid any
attention to what happened
after words, they were
removed in the spring and
only one stem would do that)
https://horticulture.co.uk/rhubarb/thin-stalks/
p.s. under varieties in the above web page it says this:
"The colour is a strong red, though it will fade to green in warmer climes.
Stalks are longer and thinner than some other options on this list, while the taste of the rhubarb is especially sweet.
As such, you may want to moderate the amount of sugar you add to a recipe when using Timperley Early rhubarb."
In the 1982 cookbook The Foods and Wines of Spain, by the late Penelope Casas, there is a recipe (yes, really) for calves' liver with rhubarb sauce. She explains that, while the dish is made with rhubarb leaves, she has substituted sorrel leaves because in the United States (where the book was published) rhubarb leaves are not eaten, “and, indeed, are considered poisonous”. In my Pennsylvania Dutch family this was held to be true, and I read this article with great interest. Thanks for the research and writing.
Thanks! That's pretty interesting, so I wonder if something did happen at some point in which bad press around rhubarb leaves just happened to make it so that people stayed away from it. Did they recipe call for a lot of rhubarb leaves? Interesting if the recipe was changed just for an American audience as well so it's just modified more American fears.
I have been freeze drying rhubarb, powdering it & then making rhubarb curd (rhubarb curd from fresh is very tasty as well). We had a large rhubarb patch when I was a kid & ate sticks raw, dipped i to a dixie cup full of sugar.
Wow dipping it in sugar sounds pretty common! That makes me want to try it just to see how that is.
I have a gorgeous, prolific rhubarb plant. I enjoy it every spring. I share with those brave enough to try.
I bake with it, make a cocktail syrup, also sauté with kale. I think it’s glorious
Everyone is convincing me that it's something I should at least try so I'll see if I can find some and try making something out of it!
I really enjoy it. Our local natural foods store has it. I’ll bet you can find some at the local farmers market. I hope you enjoy it.
yes it has. its challenging to cook, but my neighbor just served some (cooked, reduced with a tiny bit of spices and sugar) on ice cream, it was to die for.