Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rhubarb, Stewed
Rhubarb, Stewed
Stewed rhubarb is of two kinds. When it first comes into season it is small, tender, and of a bright red colour, and when stewed makes a very pretty dish. The red rhubarb should be cut into little pieces about two inches long. Very little water will be required, as the rhubarb contains much moisture. The amount of sugar added depends entirely upon taste. The stewed rhubarb should be sent to table unbroken, and floating in a bright red juice. When rhubarb is old and green it is best served mashed, or like a puree. Old rhubarb is often stringy, and can with advantage be rubbed through a wire sieve. It is no use attempting to colour old rhubarb, red, but its colour can be improved by the addition of a very little spinach juice.
The whole point of the first version is intact pieces in clear red syrup, and that depends almost entirely on how little you disturb the pan. The book gives no quantities, so the working numbers below are the modern defaults.
- The hinge: do not stirRhubarb collapses the moment it is agitated. Lay the two-inch pieces in a single layer in a wide pan, cover, and cook over the lowest heat for 5 to 8 minutes, shaking the pan once rather than stirring. Test with the tip of a knife and take it off the heat while the pieces still hold their shape; they carry on softening as they cool.
- "Very little water"Two tablespoons for a pound of rhubarb is enough, and many cooks use none at all, simply tossing the cut stalks with the sugar and leaving them 30 minutes to draw their own juice. Extra water dilutes the colour the recipe is trying to protect.
- Sugar"Depends entirely upon taste" is fair, but forced early rhubarb takes about 3 oz (a scant 1/2 cup) of sugar to the pound, and coarse late stalks nearer 5 oz. Rhubarb is very acidic, so under-sugaring reads as harsh rather than merely tart.
- Oven method as an alternativeThe book gives no oven method, but baking is another way to keep the pieces unbroken: sugared rhubarb in a shallow covered dish at about 350F for 20 minutes or so, undisturbed, so that nothing in the pan can knock the fruit about.
- Trim the stalks properlyCut away and discard every trace of leaf and the swollen leaf base. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and related compounds and are not food; only the stalk is eaten. Old thick stalks may also need the outer skin pulled away in strings before cooking.
- Spinach juiceThis was a standard Victorian kitchen colouring, made by pounding raw spinach, squeezing out the juice through muslin and warming it gently until the green solids set and could be skimmed off. It shifts dull khaki stewed rhubarb towards a cleaner green rather than making it red, which is exactly the limitation the author admits.
- SievingA wire sieve and wooden spoon will do the job, but a food mill or a coarse strainer is faster and keeps the strings behind. A blender is the wrong tool: it purees the fibres back into the fruit.
- Yield and servingA pound of trimmed rhubarb serves three or four. Serve either version warm or cold with cream, custard, or plain sponge; the puree also works spooned over yoghurt or folded into whipped cream as a fool.
Rhubarb reached English kitchens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten as a dessert, and it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the leaf stalks became a garden crop for the table. Cassell's distinction between two kinds is really a distinction between forced and field-grown: over the later nineteenth century market gardeners, particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire, were raising rhubarb in heated, darkened sheds to produce the thin, pink, tender stalks the book calls "small, tender, and of a bright red colour," while outdoor stalks left into summer grow thick, green and stringy. The spinach-juice trick belongs to the same era's cheerful willingness to colour food by hand, before a general preference for leaving fruit the colour it is.