Even here in sunny Southern California, the appearance of stalks of rhubarb in the markets is a welcome burst of color and tart flavor. My mom used to tell me stories of how each spring, her mom would hand her a stalk of rhubarb and a little bowl of sugar. She would dip the rhubarb in sugar and nibble at it, then repeat until the stalk was gone. Rhubarb is the original Sweetarts before that candy was on shelves. For many of us, that combo of sweet and tart is supremely satisfying.
I was reading through the too many substacks I follow and came upon Sarah Stanback-Young’s A Good Table. She has a beautiful style of food writing and recipe development. Along with her husband, they creative culinary content for occasions and brand campaigns. They split their time between the U.K. and Southern California, and so have a lovely context of contrast for developing digital stories. She describes rhubarb as “one proper recourse to England’s endless gloom. … Blushing pink against the season’s monochrome, it arrives like a quiet rebellion to the lingering chill. Its slender stalks, vivid as watercolor brushstrokes, cut through the grey with a brightness that holds promise.” It’s good to be reminded of how special a food can be when seasons are more variable than ours.
I love rhubarb because I love pie. I find the cooked texture to be luscious, and it’s difficult to oversweeten, which is the bane of bad pie. But Stanback-Young inspired me to think beyond the pie about the vegetable we eat as a fruit. She has an entire menu of ideas for breakfast, dessert and the cocktail hour.
Blood orange and rose rhubarb ice creams from Sarah Stanback-Young’s A Good Table. Photo courtesy of A Good Table.
Stanback-Young starts off with some basics, then gives you ways to use them. First, there’s a jam that combines the rhubarb with another seasonal ingredient: blood orange juice along with cardamom and pink sparkling wine.
Rhubarb compote, aka stewed rhubarb, can be used atop your morning oatmeal, on toast in lieu of jam, on scones. I particularly like her idea of making honey butter cinnamon toast with thick slices of milk bread, and topped with a dollop of mascarpone and a spoonful of the compote.
Making a syrup is easy and will last for many cocktails, mocktails or cake infusions. She suggests using it in a rhubarb and grapefruit fizz.
If you’re ambitious and love a project, she makes blood orange and rhubarb rose ice creams for a mini baked Alaska. The base is a pistachio-rose sponge, which sounds good enough to make on its own as a tea cake, as do the ice creams on their own.
Stanback-Young encourages us to use honey at times to tame the rhubarb instead of sugar, and suggests roasting the stalks with honey to then eat with toast and ricotta.
And if you must turn the pink stalks into pie, I have a recipe on the KCRW website that we’ve talked about before: Rhubarb Raspberry Pie.