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Stewed Rhubarb
Wash the rhubarb, cut in pieces about one inch long, do not remove the skin. To every pound of rhubarb allow one pound of granulated sugar, put them together in a porcelain kettle and stand on the back of the fire until the sugar slowly melts. Do not add water. Then bring the kettle forward and boil gently without stirring. As soon as the rhubarb is tender, turn it carefully out to cool.
A four-line method that depends almost entirely on restraint: no water, no stirring, and a long slow start. The points below cover the vessel, the sugar, and the one part of the plant the book assumes you already know to throw away.
- Leaves are not foodOnly the stalks are used. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and other compounds in quantities that make them inedible; trim them off and discard them before you begin.
- Porcelain kettleThis means an enamelled cast-iron or enamel-lined pan, not porcelain china. The point is a non-reactive surface: rhubarb is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Stainless steel works equally well.
- The back of the fireOn a coal range the back was the cooler zone. On a modern hob this is your lowest setting, or a diffuser. Give the sugar time — twenty minutes or more is not unusual — to draw juice from the fruit and dissolve in it before any real heat is applied.
- Equal sugar is a lotA pound of sugar to a pound of rhubarb is a preserve ratio and will taste like one. For a stewed fruit to eat with cream, a common modern proportion is 4 to 6 oz sugar per pound of stalks, adjusted after tasting. The heavier original quantity does help the pieces hold their shape.
- No water, and no stirringRhubarb is more than ninety per cent water and releases plenty once the sugar goes on. Stirring is what turns stewed rhubarb into a stringy puree, so shake the pan instead if anything is catching.
- TimingOnce it is simmering, inch-length pieces are tender in about 8 to 12 minutes, less for thin forced stalks. Test with a knife tip rather than the clock; the difference between tender and collapsed is a couple of minutes.
- YieldA pound of trimmed stalks serves three or four as a dessert or breakfast fruit. It keeps a week covered in the fridge, and the syrup is worth saving for drinks.
Rhubarb reached English and American kitchens as a medicinal root long before anyone ate the stalks — the dried rhizome of Asian species was an established purgative in the European pharmacopoeia for centuries. Culinary rhubarb only became common in the nineteenth century, once cheap sugar made the acidity manageable, and it earned the name pie plant in America for the use it was most often put to. Its place here in a vegetable book rather than among the desserts reflects botanical fact rather than kitchen practice: it is a leaf stalk, though in the kitchen it was generally handled as a fruit. Forced rhubarb, grown in the dark under pots for pale tender stalks, arrived in the early spring gap when nothing else fresh was available, which is much of the reason it appears at all.