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Rhubarb Sauce
The young, tender stalks of rhubarb need only be washed, tops and root cut off, then cut in one-inch pieces (without peeling). Put in a sauce-pan, add just enough water to prevent burning. Cook slowly until soft. Add sugar to sweeten to taste, cook five minutes, cool and turn into serving dish.
A plain stewed rhubarb with nothing to it but fruit, water and sugar. Two details in the original are worth taking seriously: how little water, and when the sugar goes in.
- Cut the tops off and discard themThe instruction to remove the tops is not tidiness. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds and are not eaten; only the stalk is food. Trim any trace of leaf blade away.
- "Just enough water"Rhubarb is well over ninety percent water and collapses into its own juice. Two or three tablespoons for a pound of stalks is plenty in a heavy pan over low heat; much more than a quarter cup tends to give thin, watery sauce.
- Sugar goes in after the fruit softensThis is the hinge of the recipe. Sugar draws water out of the stalks and slows the breakdown, so stalks cooked in syrup from the start stay in stubborn chunks. Cook to softness first, sweeten second.
- How much sugarThe original leaves it to taste, which is fair, since rhubarb varies. Start at 1/3 to 1/2 cup per pound of trimmed stalks, stir off the heat until dissolved, then taste and add more.
- Don't peelThe skin carries most of the red color and softens away in cooking. Peeled stalks give a duller, greener sauce. Only peel if the stalks are thick, late-season and stringy.
- TimingYoung forced stalks are soft in 8 to 12 minutes; field rhubarb may take 20. Stir as little as possible if you want some pieces to hold their shape, or stir freely for a purée.
- Yield and servingA pound of stalks makes roughly 2 cups of sauce, enough for four. Served cold as a dish in its own right in this book, it also goes with roast pork, oily fish, or a spoonful of cream.
- February rhubarbForced rhubarb -- Early in the season, forced or hothouse rhubarb is what you will find: pale pink, thin, very tender, and low in fiber. It needs the short end of every timing given here.
Rhubarb reached European kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a stalk; the culinary varieties spread through English gardens in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it was a common presence in American kitchen gardens by the later nineteenth century. Its old nickname, pieplant, tells you what it was mainly for. Early stalks depend on forcing: growers covered dormant crowns in dark sheds or under pots so the stalks shot up pale and tender weeks ahead of the outdoor crop, which made rhubarb one of the first tart "fruits" of the year, at a point in the calendar when the alternatives were largely dried apples and last summer's preserves.