Rhubarb.
Move over forced rhubarb, it's English rhubarb season. Plus, a recipe for a refreshing Rhubarb Spritz.
Welcome to ingredient, where once a month I take a deep dive into some of my favourite seasonal and store cupboard ingredients. This month I’m focusing on rhubarb. No, not the super expensive, electric pink forced stuff we all obsess over throughout February, but the delicious, wholesome stalks that occur if we just let a rhubarb crown grow outside without interfering with it.
And, as the temperatures are soaring outside and a bottle of Limoncello J’s parents brought us back from the Amalfi coast got me started on mixing up an end-of-the-week (okay, often an end-of-the-day!) spritz early this year, I’ve been infusing vermouth with said rhubarb to make the refreshing Rhubarb Spritz recipe at the bottom of this post. I’m still messing around with a few more rhubarb recipes to share later this month, so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on those either!
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Our rhubarb crown has a special place in our family. Generous, abundant and the historic contributor to hundreds of crumbles and jars of my mother’s excellent rhubarb and vanilla jam, and dozens of bottles of my parent’s excellent rhubarb wine over the years, it has quite literally moved house with us three times.
When I was a child, it lived in a breeze-block planter nearest the similarly constructed compost bins, handily placed to slice the giant leaves off into with my mother’s green handled garden knife before carrying the stalks on their trek back up the track to the house. Always for crumble in those days, though the jam started to appear in our last few years at the house.
Before that, it joined our family from the garden of a house in Flimwell, a little village on the Kent / East Sussex border not too far from where I now live. When they were first together, my parents used to do up houses, living in them whilst my father carried out the work, and then moving on to the next one when it was time to sell. Clearing the garden on his JCB one day in the mid-1980’s, my father uncovered a rhubarb crown. My grandfather - a child of World War II rationing and with the ‘waste not want not’ mindset that instilled - horrified that the rhubarb might be lost in the clearance dug it up, and planted it in the aforementioned breeze-block planter at what would become my childhood home when my parents bought it off him a few years before I was born.
Now, the rhubarb stands in a corner bed in my parents abundant vegetable garden, stretching out a great many stalks and sharing the space with my mother’s sweet pea tee pee - still green when I took these photos a few weeks ago, but now starting to bloom with heavily fragranced deep purple flowers she keeps texting me pictures of already filling up vases on her kitchen table. It’s practically part of the family.
As I mentioned before, this hardy rhubarb is very much a different beast to the delicate, electric pink forced rhubarb we covet in the depths of winter, even though it is literally the same plant: every year our family rhubarb crown has a little of its glory covered with an upside down black plastic bin weighed down with bricks to exclude all sunlight and force a little; the rhubarb tart pictured below I made during lockdown when J and I were accidentally stranded at my parents house (stuck in an English country house with extensive gardens and an endless supply of home grown vegetables at a time of shortages versus our tiny, shared garden London, did we cope?? Looking back I can’t believe we were so lucky…) was made with rhubarb forced by my father in exactly this way:
That being said, when it comes to the cook there is very much a difference between the two types of rhubarb. Whilst it is easy to coax the sweetness from the forced variety which also has patisserie value in it’s vibrant hue, I think a little more experience is required in dealing with the outdoors variety, and by that I mean experience in knowing what works and what doesn’t, rather than any particular culinary skill.
These rhubarb stalks tend to be a lot bigger, a lot more fibrous, and a lot tarter, whilst when infused in alcohol as you’ll see below or suspended in a syrup as when I make up a batch of my rhubarb and cardamom cordial to sip over ice with sparkling water on a hot day you can coax out a good amount of their pink colour from the red part of the stalk nearest the crown, you can’t bank on their being aesthetic in any way.
Strawberry recipes.
Free-form Strawberry and Rhubarb Tarts. These simple tarts made with egg washed puff pastry, a few strawberries and a couple of pieces of English rhubarb from the garden tossed together with a bit of sugar and cornstarch are as simple as a summer tart can get. Serve with homemade vanilla ice cream, or a dollop of good creme fraiche.
These Strawberry and Rhubarb Tarts I shared last year show that when simply baked rhubarb needs a sweeter supporting act as has here in seasonal strawberries and a touch of sugar, and that their slices still hold their shape and colour when baked. But, don’t discount it for baking into desserts, just remember this is what this rhubarb will do - forced rhubarb is so expensive, and this outdoor rhubarb is so abundant - of course this is the rhubarb intended for a good old-fashioned crumble and it will still yield the most delicious of flavours.
I think this rhubarb is also better suited to jam making: see again what I just said about affordability and abundance? Whilst my own homemade damson jam comes in as a close second, and if I have to buy a jar for any reason it will always be Bonne Maman’s peach jam that goes into my basket, my absolute favourite jam is this recipe my mother uses to make rhubarb and vanilla jam. Click through and look at the picture; it is proof that in some years you do get a little more pink out of the rhubarb, but most of the time our jam comes out a slight but not unpleasant greenish-grey with the palest of pink twinges shot through, prettily flecked with vanilla seeds. I’ve re-written that sentence about ten times and I still can’t make it sound appetising, but unfortunately I’ve eaten it all so I don’t have a jar to show you. But what it is lacking in visual appeal it more than makes up in flavour with just the right balance between sweet, tart and fragrant. I’ve tried making the same recipe with forced rhubarb and what I got tastes like generic candy with all the nuance of the rhubarb lost.
In a savoury context, I do admit this rhubarb struggles to perform more than in it’s earlier forced guise. You have to respect the sourness and note the fibrous texture (for example, the sweet and sour sauce I make to go with pork with forced rhubarb just does not work with this outdoor stuff), but whilst I’m not comfortable sharing full details yet as I’m still not 100% sure I won’t scrap the recipe I’m working on and try something else instead, do stay tuned for more later in the month.
I had originally asked my parents if I could come and photograph them making their rhubarb wine for this newsletter, step-by-step, but that is going to have to wait to be a project for later as there is so much going on in the garden at the moment with their expansion of the vegetable area, developments in the fruit cage and new paths being laid in the woodland area they’re not making any this year. But, my mind was still set on finishing off this piece by discussing rhubarb’s relationship with alcohol.
Usually when a cookbook appeals to me it is because it either brings a cuisine I already love cooking, or wish to learn how to cook into hyper-focus, or because it is packed with easy, new ways for me to cook seasonal vegetables. Therefore, because I own many of the latter I have many, many different recipes for infusing rhubarb gin at my fingertips. But, these are mostly for making with the aforementioned really expensive forced rhubarb, which I can think of much better uses for, and because I know Warners Distillery make a better one that I could ever manage at home (full disclosure, they did gift me their current bottle but I will be replacing it!) I’ve never bothered.
But that does not mean rhubarb has no value as an infusion fruit. So instead I decided to infuse my rhubarb - as I would have done if using gin with the help of a little sugar - in vermouth instead to create a light, wine-based infusion ripe for balancing into an Italian-style spritz. The result is light, has gentle notes of rhubarb, and is perfect for sipping in the garden at the end of a hot day. As I did yesterday.
Rhubarb Spritz
Serves: 1, Infusion time: 1 week, Preparation time: 5 minutes
Infusing rhubarb in vermouth creates a light, delicate wine-and-juice based drink which you need to splash over ice in greater quantities than you would with the Aperol or Limoncello bases of other seasonal spritz recipes. You also want to use good Prosecco here as any flaws are noticeable in the flavour the way it is not in the other aforementioned serves. Or, you could lean into the slightly English slant of this drink and use English sparkling wine; you’ll not be wasting an admittedly much pricier bottle because as I mentioned, you do taste it in the finished drink. I’d recommend going for a bottle of Chapel Down’s basic English fizz - local to me, they produce enough of it to be a little more affordable on the English wine market, but still tastes lovely and worthy enough to be sipped on it’s own once you’ve opened some for the aperitif. Most supermarkets also carry it as their ‘English wine’ option.
If you’re serving these to guests and you want to go all out with rhubarb ribbons in your glass, these are easily made with the vegetable peeler: focus on the pink bottom of the rhubarb stalk rather than the green top for aesthetics, and note that you’ll only be able to take off the skin with your peeler so plan accordingly.
For the Rhubarb Vermouth
(makes enough for 6 drinks, and easily scaled)
600ml dry vermouth
600g chopped rhubarb
55g white caster sugar
For the Rhubarb Spritz
(to make one spritz in a wine or balloon glass)
generous handful ice
100ml rhubarb vermouth
100ml prosecco
35ml soda water
To make the rhubarb vermouth, combine all the ingredients in a large, clip top preserving jar. Shake well, and continue to shake well every day or so until the sugar is dissolved. The vermouth will be ready to strain and drink in a weeks time.
To mix a rhubarb spritz, add a generous amount of ice to a wine or balloon glass and top up with the vermouth, Prosecco and soda water. Stir gently with a long spoon before drinking.
If only I could grow rhubarb. I tried growing it for years, and eventually I gave up: too hot, too dry here in Tuscany in the summer. But rhubarb is one of my absolute favourite ingredients!
For me, the fruit year for pies and tarts begins with rhubarb. I grow my own...so easy...from a plant that has personal history, too, Rachel. Making a rhubarb shrub (fruit, sugar, vinegar) and mixing with sparkling water is another favorite way I enjoy it. I would love to see photos of your folks’ garden.