This is Patch, my two month old rhubarb plant
by Chris Harris
Mention rhubarb and most of us immediately think of pudding. Rhubarb crumble drowning in custard. Rhubarb pie. Stewed rhubarb with enough sugar to make your dentist wince. Rhubarb and ginger jam. These days we instinctively put rhubarb alongside apples, strawberries, plums and other fruits. Except rhubarb isn’t a fruit. It’s a vegetable, and part of it is poisonous. Which makes the person who first looked at the stuff and thought, I reckon we could make a pudding out of that, deserving of some recognition.
Why Is Rhubarb a Vegetable?
Botanically, fruits develop from the flower of a plant and contain its seeds. Apples, tomatoes, cherries and cucumbers are fruits by that definition. What we eat with rhubarb is completely different. Those great red and green sticks are the plant’s leaf stalks, or petioles. Eating rhubarb is therefore rather more like eating celery than eating an apple. It’s our kitchens rather than botany that have turned it into an honorary fruit. And there is a good reason for that. Bite into a stick of raw rhubarb and you’ll discover something remarkably sour. Add sugar and cook it, however, and the sharpness becomes rather wonderful. But rhubarb wasn’t always primarily pudding material.
Rhubarb Before the Crumble
Rhubarb has an extraordinarily long history. Various species were being used in China thousands of years ago, principally as medicine rather than food. The prized part wasn’t actually the stalk at all, but the root, which was dried and used medicinally, particularly as a laxative. Rhubarb eventually travelled westwards along Asian trading routes and became an expensive commodity in medieval Europe. So if we could visit a British kitchen several centuries ago expecting to find everyone merrily making rhubarb crumble, we’d be disappointed. The familiar culinary rhubarb we know today came much later. And there was another very practical problem. Sugar was expensive. Without plenty of sweetness, rhubarb isn’t exactly an obvious candidate for dessert.
So Was Rhubarb Once Cooked Like a Vegetable?
This is where the story becomes slightly more complicated. It’s tempting to imagine medieval cooks throwing rhubarb stalks into stews alongside carrots and onions. But historically that isn’t really what happened. For much of rhubarb’s early European history it was an imported medicinal root, not an everyday vegetable sitting in the kitchen garden. Once edible stalk rhubarb became established in Britain, particularly from the 18th century onwards, cooks began experimenting with it. Before the modern obsession with crumble, rhubarb could turn up in sauces, preserves, tarts, pies and stewed preparations. Its fierce acidity also made it useful in ways we would now associate with gooseberries, lemons or other sour ingredients. And this gives us a clue to how versatile rhubarb actually is. Take away the sugar and custard and there’s no particular reason it has to be a pudding ingredient. Modern savoury cooking has rediscovered this, pairing rhubarb with fatty meats such as pork and duck, oily fish, spices and strongly flavoured sauces. In other words, we’ve spent generations treating a vegetable as a fruit when it is perfectly capable of behaving like a vegetable again.
And Then Sugar Changed Everything
Rhubarb’s great transformation came as sugar became progressively cheaper and more widely available in Britain during the 18th and particularly the 19th centuries. Suddenly its greatest disadvantage, its extraordinary sourness, wasn’t a problem. Sweeten it. Rhubarb pies and tarts became increasingly popular. By the Victorian period, cultivated and eventually forced rhubarb had become firmly established in British food culture. And from there came the rhubarb we recognise today. Crumble. Custard. Jam. Compote. Fool. Cake. Pie. The vegetable had successfully infiltrated the pudding trolley.
Oh, and Don’t Eat the Leaves
There is one rather important catch. The stalk is edible. The leaves aren’t. Rhubarb leaves contain relatively high levels of oxalic acid as well as other compounds and should not be eaten. Consuming enough can cause poisoning, with symptoms potentially including nausea and vomiting, and serious poisoning is possible. So don’t think that because you’ve happily demolished a bowl of rhubarb crumble you can bung the leaves into tomorrow’s salad. You can’t. Cut them off and discard them.
The World’s Strangest Pudding Vegetable?
Perhaps rhubarb’s identity crisis is what makes it so interesting. Botanically it’s a vegetable. Historically it spent centuries being valued primarily as a medicine. Its leaves are poisonous. Its raw stalks are almost comically sour. And yet the British eventually took this peculiar plant, poured mountains of sugar over it, covered it in crumble, added custard and turned it into one of our great comfort foods. Which, when you think about it, is a very British solution to a vegetable that didn’t know what it wanted to be.
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