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Triangles, Teatime and Foreign River Roots….

Writer's picture: Julia WarrenJulia Warren

Dancing and Singing(Peasants Returning from Work) - Ma Yuan, 1160-1225
Dancing and Singing(Peasants Returning from Work) - Ma Yuan, 1160-1225

They have been out in the fields all day, and the baskets overflow with greens and brilliant pinks, bobbing across the landscape on the backs of the pickers. The amount is painstakingly weighed and recorded.

Mr Plum dips his pen in ink and writes down the last basket of the day - the pink stalks will be shunted off to physicians, wealthy families, apothecaries - for they produce a prized medicine. It has been so for as long as anyone can remember. The plants have taken on a reputation that spreads beyond the Central Land - why, for instance, the other day, a foreigner had arrived, asking for some to take back to his country. Why not? He cannot take much, and if his compatriots develop a taste for it, all well and good for trading.

Where was the foreigner travelling to? Italy? Good, then he shall take the Silk Road - it is the best route. Have some tea while they fetch the samples. Shall we wrap it for you? The foreign traveller accepts and he and Mr Plum exchange pleasantries over their tea as the sun lowers in the sky.

The sample stalks are tied up and wrapped, green and pink peeking out here and there. The traveller makes his adieux - come back soon! And off he goes.


And so Marco Polo traipsed back across a continent, bringing the earliest known sample of this exotic plant, that many called rhabarbarum (for it was a foreign plant that grew on the banks of the great Russian river Rha) - and soon after, rhubarb became one of the top sought-after medicines in the West.


from "The Travels of Marco Polo" ("Il milione"),1324
from "The Travels of Marco Polo" ("Il milione"),1324

By the 18th century, tea and rhubarb were the big exports to Europe, at high expense - rhubarb exceeded the value of sugar and spices, costly items indeed that were often locked away in caddies to prevent theft.

By the late 1700s, once farmers in the West had learnt to cultivate it, rhubarb finally entered the culinary arena, as bears witness this recipe from Mrs Rundell of Boston, 1807 in her ‘New System Of Domestic Cookery, Formed Upon Principles Of Economy, And Adapted To The Use Of Private Families’ :


‘Rhubarb Tart.

Cut the stalks in lengths of four or five inches, and take off the thin skin. If you have a hot hearth, lay them in a dish, and put over a thin syrup of sugar and water: cover with another dish, and let it simmer very slowly an hour; or do them in a blocktin saucepan. When cold, make into a tart, as codlin.’



Five o'clock tea by Julius Leblanc Stewart
Five o'clock tea by Julius Leblanc Stewart

With the lowering cost of sugar in the 19th century, desserts became increasingly popular and accessible, and rhubarb was now a homegrown commodity, used for wines as well as sweets, although this trend was less noticeable in France than in Britain. Then quite by chance, some rhubarb roots were accidentally covered with soil one winter. The rhubarb, left to its own devices, shot forth fresh shoots, which were discovered a couple of weeks later. The development of the ‘forced’ rhubarb process spread until in 1877 the process was introduced in Yorkshire, in particular the Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield, which came to be known as the Rhubarb Triangle.


Rhubarb shot to fame as a Victorian superfood, becoming possibly a ‘celebrity’ in its own right - healthy as well as tasty, what was not to like? With trainloads of the stuff pouring into the capital and across the kingdom, it was not difficult to imagine that the British lived solely off a diet of tea and rhubarb. Indeed, as  General Lin wrote to Queen Victoria in 1840 when referring to the deleterious opium trading which Britain was engaged in :


Has China (we should like to ask) ever yet sent forth a noxious article from its soil? Not to speak of our tea and rhubarb;, things which your foreign countries could not exist a single day without, if we of the Central Land were to grudge you what is beneficial, and not to compassionate your wants, then wherewithal could you foreigners manage to exist?’


His belief was that many British sailors would die of constipation immediately if deprived of rhubarb and Chinese tea. Luckily for the sailors, the Rhubarb Triangle was able to keep up supply and demand, just in time for tea - which was also imported from India.

By the mid-19th century rhubarb could be found on most dinner tables in one form or another, and has remained on the menu ever since. Let’s round off with another recipe, this time from Mrs Beeton’s Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery, published in 1865:


RHUBARB TART.

Ingredients.—½ lb. of puff-paste, about 5 sticks of large rhubarb, ¼ lb. of moist sugar. 


Mode.—

Make a puff-crust; line the edges of a deep pie-dish with it, and wash, wipe, and cut the rhubarb into pieces about 1 inch long. Should it be old and tough, string it—that is to say, pare off the outside skin.

Pile the fruit high in the dish, as it shrinks very much in the cooking; put in the sugar, cover with crust, ornament the edges, and bake the tart in a well-heated oven from ½ to ¾ hour. 


If wanted very nice, brush it over with the white of an egg beaten to a stiff froth, then sprinkle on it some sifted sugar, and put it in the oven just to set the glaze: this should be done when the tart is nearly baked. 


A small quantity of lemon-juice, and a little of the peel minced, are by many persons considered an improvement to the flavour of rhubarb tart. 

Time.—½ to ¾ hour. 

Average cost, 9d. Sufficient for 5 persons. Seasonable from February to May.


Tea by George Dunlop Leslie
Tea by George Dunlop Leslie


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