Yum, yum, rhubarb! I recently arrived home to Craig Alaska, and I found my rhubarb going gangbusters, with leaves the size of pizza pans and stalks that look like they really mean business.

I also found a pair of “just rhubarb” recipe books on my dining room table. Wonder who put them there? Regardless of who perpetrated the idea, I have set myself the task of baking my way through those books, one rhubarb delicacy at a time. So far, I have produced a traditional rhubarb pie, a rhubarb-custard pie, and yesterday, a rhubarb-applesauce coffee cake. This last recipe was particularly appropriate because I had an open jar of applesauce in the fridge as well as a half-full container of plain yogurt, which the recipe also called for.

So far, neither of the “new” recipes can–in my august, potentially minority, opinion–hold a candle to tried-and-true rhubarb pie. But the summer is young.

Considering my next recipe-related move, and gazing fondly at my beautiful plants, I asked myself, how did I luck out? How did this rhubarb come to be here, so happy, in my back yard?

Come to find out, rhubarb is not native to North America. A modest amount of research tells me that the first indication of rhubarb-as-a-thing comes from China about 2700 B.C. The Chinese, probably noting the nasty taste of the leaves (if you sit down and force feed yourself ten or more pounds of these leaves in one sitting, you might die from oxalic acid poisoning; or if you do not die, you will probably spend some time wishing that you had), they decided the plant would be better as medicine than food. They used it for digestive problems and as an excellent laxative. People in that area got wind (sorry) of these useful properties, and the plant spread via the Silk Road and other avenues to places like Mongolia and Tibet.  

It took some time, but rhubarb eventually found its way to Europe in the medieval era, and people began timidly trying it out as food as well as medicine. Long about 1700, folks finally stopped worrying about the leaves and began using the healthy, delicious stalks to produce delicacies of the sort that I’m drooling over right now.  About a hundred years later, in the early 1800’s, European settlers brought it to North America. Now it is everywhere!

Well, not quite everywhere. Rhubarb likes a cool climate and hard winter freeze, so the northern-more latitudes of the world are where you will find it.* Southeast Alaska, apparently, is just about letter-perfect as a rhubarb habitat. All one has to do is keep it happy, with good drainage, plenty of sunshine, and some rich fertilizer.  My husband makes a yummy brew of compost, soil, fish carcasses and crab shells, adds plenty of water, and lets the juice leach into the soil around the plants. I think that, if they could, those individual stalks would get up and march around the yard.

Mmmm, checking my recipe book again. Strawberry-rhubarb crunch, anyone? Or maybe some orange-rhubarb jam?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

*I googled “rhubarb in the southern hemisphere” and all I got was a bunch or articles about getting rhubarb to grow in the American south. Go figure.

References:

The History of Rhubarb: From Ancient Times to Modern Day – Rhubarbs

Kozlak, C. 2019. Rhubarb: Fifty tried and true recipes. Adventure Publications, Cambridge, Minnesota.

Millang, T. 2004. The joy of rhubarb: The versatile summer delight. Adventure Publications. Cambridge, Minnesota.