The rhubarb train

I'm still on the rhubarb train. And, although we are just now gliding into June, it remains possible, I tell you, to find rhubarb at your grocery store or local farmer’s market. Soon it will be gone, though, I'm sad to say. We are, as I type these very words, running out of time. 

In light of all of this, I bring you today a collection of rhubarb recipes in tandem with one very delicious, seasonal, cake-pie-crumble-hybrid-dessert thing. Yes, that is what we have here, officially. 

The recipe comes from the pages of Nigel Slater’s brilliant tome Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard. As suggested by the title, Ripe is a book about a cook and his homegrown fruit. It is a delectable and delightful collection of recipes, nestled among tender photos of Nigel’s garden and the wonderful and varied things that he is able to make from it. His section on rhubarb is formidable. It includes a rundown of the many heirloom varieties (with names such as Muriel, Cutbush’s Seedling, and The Streeter), a brief history, and a starry-eyed ode that speaks volumes to his love of the stalky, poison-leafed plant. 

“How could anyone not love something known as the pie plant—or indeed, anything whose stems offer such vibrant color at a time of the year when most of our fruit is sleeping?” Nigel begins. “Yet rhubarb has never found the broad audience enjoyed by the raspberry or the apple. Instead, it has a loyal, almost cultish following, happy to indulge in its piercing crimson sharpness.”

I don’t think a more beautiful description of rhubarb has ever appeared in print than “piercing crimson sharpness.” 

Rhubarb inspires those who love it to inhabit a certain madness. We might surreptitiously pull a stalk from a neighbor’s yard. We might howl at the heavens shaking a mighty fistful. We might write book chapters about the plant that read like proper odes to a long-lost friend. Such is the cultish following that rhubarb enjoys. 

To accompany the recipe for this cake—which, by the way, is so delicious; crunchy, hearty, sweet, and tart all at once—I give you a list of of thirteen more things to do with rhubarb. I am hoping to make this a regular practice on the site, once per month or so, to compile a list of recipes exploring a particular fruit, vegetable, or food category. I will learn some things in the process, I hope, about vinegars, or homemade ricotta, or cherries, or peas, or yeasted doughs. And, in its own way, this blog may become something of a resource for us cooks, gardeners, and rhubarb-chasers alike. 

So, go forth with your fistfuls of crimson sharpness! Let's enjoy it while it lasts. 

13 Recipes to Inspire Rhubarb Thievery 

Eton Mess with Rhubarb-Gin Jam and Lemon-Basil Meringue
Rhubarb "Big Crumb" Coffee Cake

Rhubarb Clafoutis

Rhubarb Compote

Rhubarb Custard Cream Pie

Rhubarb Orange

Rhubarb Shake

Rhubarb Syrup (for Cocktails)

Rhubarb Tart with Mascarpone Cream

Roasted Pork Belly with Gingery Rhubarb Compote

Rye Shortcakes with Roasted Strawberries and Rhubarb 

Strawberry Rhubarb Salad with Mint and Hazelnuts

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Rhubarb-Raspberry Cornmeal Cake

Adapted from Ripe

Notes: The most significant modification I made to this recipe was to add raspberries. You could easily omit them, and I'm sure the cake would be delicious. Alternately, I would guess that strawberries could also be tossed in at the last second. For a summer version of this cake, I would try it with nectarines or plums. The original recipe calls for golden baker's sugar. I substituted a combination of light brown sugar and granulated in the crust, and light brown only for the fruit.

Filling:
1 pound rhubarb
1/4 cup light brown sugar
4 tablespoons water
3 ounces (3/4 cups) raspberries

Crust:
3/4 cups coarse polenta or cornmeal
1 1/2 cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Generous pinch of cinnamon
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup light brown sugar
Zest of one organic orange, finely grated
10 tablespoons butter, chilled
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon demerara or Turbinado sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place a baking sheet inside the oven. Butter a 9-inch round cake pan; line with parchment once across, and butter the parchment.

Trim the ends of the rhubarb, and cut each stalk into roughly 2-inch pieces. Place in a large baking dish, adding the sugar and water on top. Roast for 30 minutes, or until the rhubarb is soft, but still has some shape. Drain the rhubarb, reserving the juice. (You can pause at this point; the roasted rhubarb will keep for a day or so in the fridge. The cake can then be assembled quickly the day you plan to serve it.)

In a large bowl, combine the polenta, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and sugars with a wooden spoon. Cut the butter into smallish cubes and add it to the flour mixture. Add the orange zest. Use a pastry blender to cut the butter into the flour mixture, until the mixture resembles a coarse meal. There should still be some pea-sized pieces of butter.

In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the milk. Pour it into the flour mixture, and use your hands to blend the crust together. Stop as soon as the mixture comes together being careful not to overmix. The dough should be somewhat sticky. If it is not, add 1–2 tablespoons more milk.

Scoop out two-thirds of the dough, and press it into the prepared pan with your fingers. It should go up the sides about half an inch higher than the dough that forms the base. Toss the rhubarb across the surface of the dough, and then scatter the raspberries over. Crumble the remaining dough over the fruit, and sprinkle with the demarara sugar to finish.

Bake for 1 hour, on the preheated baking sheet, or until the crust is a rich golden brown. Serve with the reserved juice from the rhubarb drizzled on top.

Rhubarb + Custard = Springtime Dessert Pleasure

Dear Friends,

Thank you for the outpouring of support that I received from you all this week—turns out, much to my surprise, that I have readers. Readers. A stray few that turned into a stray few more, that turned into an outpouring of emails and support and page views when I went “public” this week (me and facebook—albeit on very different scales).

Thank you.

For my part, I’ll try not to be daunted by the fact that this is no longer a secret pursuit, and I will trek on, starting right now with custard and rhubarb and a tillandsia in the background (don’t eat the tillandsia).

I thought I would continue on my last-gasp-of-spring theme and dig up a rhubarb recipe. I wasn’t sure what at first—crumble or coffee cake? compote or pie? And then it struck me—could one make a rhubarb clafoutis? Something warm and custardy and oozing of fruit, scented of lemon, and crinkly and curled in all sorts of delicious ways on top? Yes. Apparently, one can. I googled the phrase “rhubarb clafoutis” and came up with a fair few options. They were all roughly the same, give or take a few small additions or subtractions here or there; some with cinnamon, a few with citrus, all with that roasted rhubarb base and a decadent layer of yellow custard on top.

I’ve always wanted to make a clafoutis. Somehow daunted by what seemed too lovely to be very manageable, I’ve learned now that, in fact, it is one of the more simple desserts that one could possibly make. I’ve also learned that without using the traditional black cherries as your fruit, the dish is properly called a flaugnarde—the roots of which derive from words meaning “soft” or “downy.”

The dish is indeed soft, as custards often are, but especially so when eaten warm out of the oven. In this state, it is also fragrant and pillowy and oozing—all things that should be strived for when it comes to dessert consumption.

Thick slices of rhubarb are roasted in cinnamon and sugar in a tart or custard dish, and then, once softened and brought down to room temperature, a mixture of eggs, milk, flour, vanilla, sugar, and lemon zest is poured directly over top of this once sputtering, bright pink fruit. Into the oven it goes once more and within the hour you will be eating a warm, springtime custard. Perfect for evenings with a slight chill in the air; perfect for a midday picnic; perfect for breakfast the next day, even when it has chilled and firmed and has become, suddenly, sliceable—perfect, really, for anytime at all. 

Roasted Rhubarb Clafoutis (more accurately referred to as Roasted Rhubarb Flaugnarde), adapted from theKitchn

2 cups rhubarb, sliced to a thickness of 1/2 inch

1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon lemon zest

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

3 eggs

1 cup whole milk

1/2 cup flour

A pinch of salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the rhubarb and place it directly into your custard or tart dish; toss it with the cinnamon and 2 tablespoons of the sugar. Let this macerate for approximately 10 minutes, or until the juices of the rhubarb have begun to yield.

Roast the rhubarb for 20 minutes or until it is bubbling and soft when pierced with a fork.

Remove from the oven and let it cool until it is just warm and no longer hot and steaming.

While the rhubarb is cooling, whisk together the eggs, vanilla, and sugar; whisk in the milk, and then the flour, lemon zest, and a pinch of salt. Whisk the batter until the flour lumps have dissolved, but be a bit gently with it so that the batter doesn't become tough.

Pour this mixture over the rhubarb and bake for 35-40 minutes. The clafoutis should be set but still somewhat soft in the center. It will have risen in shocking and uneven ways—don't worry, it will settle down as it cools.

Let the clafoutis rest for 5-10 minutes, and serve.

Afterword

I can’t really write about rhubarb, or consume it, or smell it, or see it in a store even, without thinking about the rhubarb plants that line a creek in the woods of upstate New York behind the house where my mother grew up. Prehistoric looking specimens, they are thick and tall with large, arching, and poisonous, leaves. We never see those plants anymore, but apparently they have been growing prolifically for at least eighty years or more. My mother dug some up at one point and planted them in her own garden, where they now grow, referred to as “grandpa’s rhubarb.” These plants accompany, further off, in a separate field, “grandpa’s apple tree” and “grandpa’s lilacs.” From the stories of this grandpa, whom I never knew, I learned to identify edible honeysuckle, elderberries, and black caps; we learned to suck the tips of the honeysuckle in the woods until they released their bright pearls of liquid; we learned how to find the wild spring violets and orchids and the red cardinal flowers that sprung up, inexplicably, in the streams. We learned about a raccoon named Brudel that he called and fed by hand, as a sort of dog-like pet. We learned about elderberry wine, and beaver dams, and the virtues of the frothy top of a mug of beer, among many other bits of lore and wisdom. Food is ancient and its reach is immeasurable. It is also fleeting and transitory. We consume it and it is gone. But the stories persist and the memories, embedded as they are in the aromas of a childhood kitchen, remain.