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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Rhubarb
To Dry Rhubarb. - To dry the stalks of rhubarb, first strip off the outer skin with a sharp knife. This is a painstaking process, but it pays as the rhubarb dries more quickly and thoroughly. Spread on cloths in the sun, preferably under a hotbed sash, and dry as quickly as possible.
To Cure Rhubarb Root.-Pull up the roots from the old rhubarb bed when a new bed has been set out.
Brush off the earth with a dry brush, and cut the roots into squares 2 inches long. Take off the skin with a sharp knife. Bore a hole through the middle and run a string through them, knotting it so as to keep each piece of root separate from the others. String these between suitable posts or pegs upon the ground, and expose to the sun to dry. Take them indoors at night or when it rains, as dampness is apt to cause mold.
To Dry Parsley. To have bright, crisp parsley, pick it in dry weather.
Spread it thinly on a platter and bake it in a moderate oven with the doors open, turning frequently. If the oven is not too hot, the leaves will become dry and brittle without losing their green color. Take care that the PRESERVATION OF MEAT AND VEGETABLES 713 heat is not sufficient to turn the leaves brown or they will be spoiled. Now rub it to powder between the palms of the hands, pick out the stalks, sift the powder through a coarse sieve, place it in a glass bottle or jar and cork tightly. Keep in a dry place. A peck or more of the parsley should be gathered, as it is reduced very much in bulk by drying. The dry powder is suitable for most purposes for which fresh parsley is employed, and is much more convenient.
Three separate drying procedures share this page, and they are not equal. The parsley and the rhubarb stalks are ordinary food drying; the rhubarb root is not food at all, and that is the reason for the warning above.
- Why the root section failsRhubarb root is a drug, not a vegetable. The rhizomes of Rheum contain anthraquinone glycosides (emodin, rhein, chrysophanol), and dried rhubarb root was long used as a purgative, dosed in small measured quantities. Dried and stored in a kitchen it invites someone to treat it as a spice or tea, with violent cramping and diarrhoea as the result. Rhubarb leaves, likewise, are never edible at any stage.
- Stalks onlyFor the drying that is worth doing, use the leaf stalks alone, trimmed clear of every trace of leaf blade at the top and of the crown at the base.
- Peeling is not fussinessThe tough outer skin on mature stalks slows moisture loss, and stalks dried in it can case-harden: dry outside, still damp in the middle, and liable to mould in storage. Peeling the ribs is what makes the difference the author claims.
- Hotbed sashA glazed wooden frame from a garden hotbed, propped over the drying cloths — a solar dryer that keeps rain and insects off while raising the temperature underneath. A dehydrator at 135F does the same job in a day and removes the weather from the equation.
- "Moderate oven" is wrong for parsleyA moderate oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 350F, and that will brown parsley in minutes. The instruction to prop the door open is the real signal: the author wants the lowest heat the range will hold, effectively 150-200F, with air moving. Modern ovens that go no lower than 200F need the door cracked for the same reason.
- A peck of parsleyEight dry quarts, loosely packed — a very large armful of bunches. It cooks down to a few ounces of powder, which is the point being made.
- StorageDried parsley keeps its colour in a dark cupboard and loses it fast on a sunny windowsill. Powdered leaf also stales faster than whole leaf, so crush only what will be used within a few months.
- If you want dried rhubarb root for any purposeUse a current, professionally sourced preparation with stated dosage rather than this method.
Rhubarb came to Europe as medicine long before it came as food. The dried root — "Turkey rhubarb" or "China rhubarb," from Rheum palmatum and its relatives — travelled overland from Asia and was one of the more valuable items in the apothecary's stock, prized as a purgative; European growers spent much of the eighteenth century trying to raise a domestic substitute. Eating the stalks is the later habit, spreading in Britain and America through the nineteenth century once cheap sugar made the acid palatable, which is why rhubarb is often filed with fruit in old books despite being a vegetable. This page catches both parts of the plant in use in one garden: the household dries its stalks for winter sauce and pies, and grubs the spent roots out of the old bed to cure, though the recipe never says to what end. The parsley note belongs to the same economy — a garden crop preserved at its peak because the alternative in January was nothing at all.