Obsession: Rhubarb

My Obsession for the Month of May is Rhubarb.  It is such a beautiful vegetable.  Perhaps one cannot really call it a fruit, but it is the first true fruit of spring.  I currently have about five plants going, which seems like quite a few, since rhubarb plants are large, but if you are canning or preserving the rhubarb, it is easy to dispatch with what five plants can produce. Putting down, or putting up the rhubarb is the task I address today.

The simplest, and very fast method for preserving rhubarb is to wash, chop, measure, and then freeze the stalks.  Simply throw them in bags in the freezer.  I always measure it first, and then label the bag with the amount inside. This simplifies things later when you go to use it.

First, both with my beautiful forced rhubarb, and my regular rhubarb crop, I made rhubarb compote, using the recipe from Alice Water's Chez Panisse Fruit:

1 lb of rhubarb
zest of 1 orange (valencia or other juice orange)
1/2 cup white sugar
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice

Combine ingredients together in an ungreased baking dish.  Bake covered for 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Remove cover and bake for another 5-10 minutes, or until rhubarb is soft, but still in pieces.  


This compote is lovely on ice cream, creme fraiche or yogurt, or eaten on its own.  It would also be nice with meat.  I find it best if you leave it for several days before eating so that the flavours can really meld.  

The orange zest beautifully tempers the tartness of the rhubarb.  The first batch of compote that I made with the forced rhubarb was eaten fairly immediately - 1 and 3/4 jars full. There they are, in the refrigerator beside last year's dill pickles. It is a beautiful bright pink colour. 

For the second batch, I multiplied the recipe six times to make enough to preserve in jars.  I harvested six pounds of rhubarb! I applied the same method as above, but after placing the compote in jars, I processed the compote for 15 minutes in a boiling water bath.  This ensured that my jars would properly seal.  Six pounds of rhubarb yielded 4 quart jars.

Notice that the compote made with this rhubarb is different in colour, made up of of the red and green parts of the rhubarb stalk.  To achieve a pink colour, you can exclude the green parts of the stalk, using only the red, but I do not like to waste any part of a good stalk of rhubarb.  I like the odd green colour of the the compote.

 Second, I made rhubarb jam, which is something I have never tried.  I always make strawberry-rhubarb jam, but this year I was inspired by my newest culinary obsession,  The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, a birthday gift from my dear mother.  The book's author, and proprietor of the Blue Chair Jam Company, Rachel Saunders, praises the purity of flavour of plain rhubarb jam:

"One thing that always mystifies me is the difficulty of finding rhubarb cooked on its own; we always seem to succumb to the temptation to combine it with something else.  Yet rhubarb's unique flavour and texture set it apart from other early summer ingredients, and a really perfect rhubarb jam is hard to beat."

The recipe contains only rhubarb, sugar and lemon juice. Lemon juice brings out the flavour of the fruit.  It is an ingredient in all of Rachel Saunders Blue Chair jams.  The jam was everything promised in this beautiful cookbook - intense fruit flavour, tart and wonderful.  I ate it for breakfast this morning.

Recently, while reacquainting myself with The Victorian Kitchen Garden,  I learned not only of the technique of growing rhubarb in a forcing pot, as I did this year, but also of raising it in a heated, darkened forcing shed to bring on the growth of rhubarb in the winter.  In the north of England, they once had whole buildings devoted to this purpose.  Rhubarb forcing factories!  Now that I've seen that, I wondered if it is possible do so in one's basement. My suspicion was confirmed by Dick Raymond of Garden Ways Joy of Gardening.  This is possible. More on this later!

Perhaps we are tired of hearing all about rhubarb, but this will not be the last you hear of it from me.  I have yet to extoll its virtues as a useful natural dye plant and mordant!

Signs of Spring: Rhubarb Custard Meringue Pie

 I adore rhubarb.

My rhubarb plants are coming along nicely outside in the garden.  I have a huge planter tipped upside down over one of the plants to force it (more on this soon), and it is going to be beautiful. In the meantime, I decided it was time to clean out the freezer - so I decided to thaw out the two remaining bags of rhubarb I froze last spring.

If you are lucky enough to have outdoor space, and fortunate enough to have your own rhubarb plants, freezing it for later is easy.  Simply pull the stems and discard the leaves, then was the stems, chop into 1" pieces and throw into freezer bags.  I had very little time last spring to process much of the rhubarb in the backyard, so instead, I have been able to enjoy it all winter.  Frozen rhubarb is easy to use in cobbler, pie, stewed or baked.  It is best to allow it to thaw completely if you are going to bake with it.

I let the rhubarb thaw in a colander placed over a large bowl to catch the all the juices as the rhubarb melts.  This is a combination of juice and water, but it is tasty to reserve for later use in jello, if mixed with other fruit juice.

I decided to make a recipe from one of my longtime favourite cookbooks, Classic Canadian Cooking, by Elizabeth Baird - Rhubarb Custard Meringue Pie.  If you ever see this book at a garage sale, I highly recommend you pick it up, as this book is out of print. I particularly like this book because it is organised according to the seasons, and has lovely menus for different occasions, and many recipes are based on historic or traditional Upper Canadian cooking.

 

While the rhubarb thawed, I prepared my pie crust.  You need only a bottom crust for this pie. Mix the rhubarb with the flour and sugar mixture. This recipe has a little bit of mace in it, which is a lovely, but unusual flavouring.  Separate your eggs, reserving the whites.  Whisk together yolks, cream and melted butter.   Spread the rhubarb mixture in the prepared pie crust.   Pour the egg mixture over top, and place pie in 450 degree oven.  Reduce heat to 350 after 10 minutes. Bake 35- 40 minutes, or until custard is set.

 While the pie is baking, whip the egg whites with vinegar and salt until they form stiff peaks.  Add sugar and vanilla. Elizabeth Baird's recipe uses three egg whites, but I only used two as to not have a leftover yolk (her meringue would be higher than mine). Spread meringue over pie.  Sprinkle with sugar and bake for another 4 minutes at 425 degrees until golden brown.

Et voila.  Allow to cool, and serve as soon as possible.  Meringue does not like to be kept waiting!  It gets weepy if you're late for dinner. 

Rhubarb Custard Pie, adapted from Classic Canadian Cooking: Menus for the Seasons, by Elizabeth Baird, published 1974 by James Lorimer & Company.

Filling:
2 1/2 cups chopped rhubarb
1 cup white sugar (I used about 3/4 cup)
2 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon mace
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup light cream or milk
1/4 melted butter

Meringue:
3 egg whites
1/2 teaspoon vinegar
1/8 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons white sugar (I used about 3 teaspoons)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon white sugar (to sprinkle on top of meringue)

Family Recipes: Part II

 In a second series of embroidered pieces containing family recipes, I used yet more recipes from my Grandma Blanche's recipe books.  Some of the recipes are odd; who would need a recipe for making cheese toast?  Here again, I translated all the marks on the page onto the cloth, all punctuation, underlines and page breaks, but I made each piece the size of a recipe card. Each recipe is then approximately life size.

 

With this second series, I embroidered the pieces on two layers of discharge silkscreen printed cotton organdy.  (Discharge being a printing paste containing a chemical that strips the colour from the cloth). Of course you can barely see the print on the pale yellow organdy.

 

My Grandma Jean was not a domestic doyenne, though she had five children and ran an efficient household.  She was much more interested in the outdoors and intellectual pursuits.  She prefered extremely simple cooking.  I remember once she had made Date Surprise Muffins - the surprise being, she said, "I was too lazy to chop the dates, so I poked a date into the middle of each muffin.  Be careful of the pits".  

However, she did have a small repertoire of famous baked goods - waffles, molasses cookies and square bales in particular.  See above her recipe for molasses cookies written in her perfect school teacher script.  These are a drop cookie, soft, cakey and chewy. Molasses was a favourite of my grandfather - he liked to put blackstrap on his oatmeal.

 

Grandma Jean liked to give imaginative names to different foods - perhaps a way of convincing my father, his two sisters and two brothers to eat their meals.  Cream of wheat was Snow Porridge, cornmeal porridge was Sun Porridge.  Square Bales were simply brown sugar oat squares, but living in the rural setting of our family farm, where hay and straw were taken off the fields every year, the name Square Bales  seems more romantic and appropriate. 

Family Recipes: Part I

This recipe for drop-cookies is from Grandma's neighbour, Mrs. Myrtle Allwell.

These embroideries are part of an on-going series of work based on my collection of recipes belonging to my grandmothers.  I have original recipe books from both my maternal grandmother and her mother, and copies and scans my aunt made me of my paternal grandmother, her mother, and mother-in-law.  Some are recipes I have made myself, or tasted as a child.  Others, I've never tried, but just like the sound of them, or not at all. 

These three embroideries are from Grandma Blanche's notebooks.  She traded recipes with friends and neighbours, and sometimes the name of the lady who gave the recipe is written on the page.  Some are written in Grandma's hand, others have been given in the hand-writing of the friend.  I love the scrawl of old handwriting, and it was important to me to translate the handwriting and punctuation exactly.  I embroidered the handwritten text onto pieces of old tea-towels and tablecloths.

In another series of embroidered pieces, Family Albums, I created portraits of family members I had never met, but only knew through photographs or stories told to me as child.  In one piece, I used my great-grandmother May's recipe for doughnuts as her portrait.  My mother remembers eating these delicious doughnuts. 

I have a scrap of paper on which May wrote the recipe in pencil. Someday I would like to try making these doughnuts, but Grandma's recipe does not provide any instructions - only ingredients, and even then, there is the vague direction for the amount of flour - "flour as for cookies".

More variations on the recipe series to follow.

Embroidered on a piece of an old apron with the pocket still attached.

Detail of my great-grandmother's signature. I love the holes and stains in the fabric.