The Rhubarb Wars
Recipe: Roasted Rhubarb Crumble
Rhubarb Patience is hard-won after seven decades of impetuous living.
As a girl, I grew up mostly in Hawaii and the western US, where I lived on citrus, pineapples, guavas, mountain apples, papayas, and other tropical-ish fruit. It wasn’t until I was a fully grown cook that I ever encountered fresh rhubarb and fell in love with the sour/sweet flavor, raw and cooked, red and green. But I never have grown it—successfully.
While I don’t need to raise a pig to make great charcuterie or plant a whole orchard to have enough apples for tarts and pies, I felt that I was missing my calling as a pastry lover by not growing my own rhubarb. I wanted that specific abundance that a garden over-delivers, that bright immediacy, to infuse my creative cooking of rhubarb in this old French kitchen at Camont.
Rhubarb has been a fugitive friend in my potager all these years. Maybe it’s not such a French thing—eating rhubarb, at least not in Gascony. I think of it as a northern thing. Wrong climate? Wrong soil? Then on a walk along the canal, I noticed a neighbor’s farm had tons of huge leafy familiar looking plants. Same climate; same soil. This year I decided to break the jinx and planted five healthy crowns (root systems) of rhubarb bought locally at the nearby Gamm Vert or farm store. I devoted an entire raised bed square to them, and relying on the expertise of Allison M., we added fertilizer, worked the soil, and planted the future tarts, crumbles, and jams with plenty of room to spread their heavy dark green (and toxic) leaves. Now to sit back and wait. What???!!! Where did they go?