The Red Menace
Copyright 2005 by Suzy Wurtz
It’s finally warm enough here in
Minnesota for us to eat the candy bars in the automobile snow emergency kits.
And while we were at it, we also ate the trail mix and drank the kits’ bottled
water. It’s also warm enough to put away the rolling cart near the door that
stores mittens, hats and scarves. This is a sure sign that the temperate weather
has arrived.
Another sure sign of spring is the appearance of the rhubarb
plant. The red buds hesitantly emerge through the earth in early spring, but
given a few warm days, rhubarb grows at amazing speed. The red stalks end in
huge green leaves. In my town, many people have rhubarb plants in their yard.
We used to have two large rhubarb plants in our yard, but I “nuked” them with
herbicide shortly after we moved into our house.
I don’t like to eat rhubarb. I do not like it here or there;
I do not like it anywhere.
To me, rhubarb is one of the most over-rated foods in the
vegetable kingdom. The rhubarb leaves and roots are toxic. The edible, bitter,
red stalk is so high in acid that you can’t cook them in aluminum, iron, or
copper
pots. I don’t like deception, either, and this is a vegetable that
spends its days masquerading as a fruit. It’s also called a pie plant. Pie
plant, my foot. The apple tree can be called a pie plant, the blueberry bush
can be called a pie plant—but rhubarb?
People wax poetic about rhubarb pie and rhubarb sauce. In my
opinion, if you need many cups of sugar to make it taste good, rhubarb is
probably not a worthy ingredient. Rhubarb is often paired with strawberry for a
good reason. Strawberries actually have FLAVOR. Just give me a strawberry pie
and skip the stringy rhubarb.
However, across North America, many people celebrate this
red, sour stalk. The Rosy Rhubarb Festival in Ontario, Canada is the 2nd
week of June in Shedden. When the man who used to dress up as Rosy Rhubarb died
in 1996, they retired his costume because, well, nobody else in Shedden wanted
to be Rosy Rhubarb. Do you blame them? They would love to sell you their recipe
books if you visit their site at
www.rosyrhubarbfestival.com. They’re not alone. There are rhubarb festivals
in New York, Maine, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Australia, and Nova
Scotia.
Am I missing something here? Do these people have so little
reason to rejoice in their lives that they celebrate rhubarb?
My neighbor always offers me some of his rhubarb, even though
he knows I won’t take any. But on Mother’s day, the one day of the year I am
allowed to request errands and get no hesitation or whining, I asked my teenager
to make a pan of ginger-rhubarb bars. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had done a
feature on Minnesota cookbook author, Beatrice Ojakangas, and had printed her
ginger-rhubarb bar recipe the previous Thursday. As long as I was throwing
barbs at rhubarb, I thought it fair to try it again.
I picked, cleaned, and chopped the two cups of rhubarb and
left it to my daughter to execute the rest of the directions. The bars were
scrumptious. But really, what’s not to like about a recipe with a stick of
butter, two kinds of sugar, eggs, flour, and sugared ginger? Oh yes, there was
some rhubarb, which provided nothing but bulk. There was no rhubarb flavor,
just delightful, moist cookie bar. She could have used celery or newspaper
shreddings and it still would have been great.
I think rhubarb has one overlooked function. Though I don’t
consider it food, it serves as a hardy landscape shrub. The huge green leaves
are quite attractive in the spring. If you don’t pick the stalks, the plant will
go to seed, with feathery beige spikes rising four feet above the plants. Of
course, to rhubarb eaters, not picking the plant is a crime.
Rhubarb has another definition in our language. Rhubarb is a
fight, altercation, heated dispute or controversy. And when you think of the
nasty, bitter taste of raw rhubarb, it’s a fitting synonym. But please, don’t
get into a rhubarb with me about rhubarb. Because if you do, I may call up to
Ontario and volunteer you to wear the Rosy Rhubarb costume in June.
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