stalky, earthy, green & tangy

Rhubarb smells like North Dakota in the summertime.

When I was little, it was regularly served in all manner of desserts. I never imagined it in a soup. I never saw it in a curry. I never heard of it included in a ceviche. (I just made that last one up--but there could be something to it.) Rhubarb is vigorously and masculinely vegetal, but it was treated as a fruit. One could liken its disregard for traditional classification to that of the tomato, which is a fruit, but accepted as a vegetable. Like gender ‘norms,’ exceptions to the rules actually make the rules seem sorta silly.

Rhubarb is a prehistoric throw back. We are consistently puzzled by its capacity to endure, its apparent extreme limitation as a food. Like an alligator made huge by eating Florida housecats, it lurks and flourishes and frightens small children in gardens which may have been neglected for decades. Even when everything else has been plowed under and covered with plant carpet, we feel guilty ripping out such a bold and persistent repeat-offender.

Our septuagenarian neighbor June in North Denver vigilantly made her yard as care free as possible, even destroying healthy trees because the leaves were a bother to clean up. There was but one survivor from her parents’ original war-time Victory garden: the rhubarb, as big as a chandelier, its potential edibility in great doubt considering its size. So she surrounded her lone, gigantic rhubarb with inlaid stones set in regulation turf. She didn’t eat the thing, but she isolated it so it wouldn’t escape or do harm to itself or others. The effect was taxidermal. She might as well have mounted it on a plinth.

(Ringing the doorbell and running away, June left enormous stalks for us on our back porch every now and again, which could have been used by the Red Cross to splint broken arms during a national emergency. That is how I learned to tame the beast in a crumble.)

And indeed, rhubarb can be preserved, in a way. Let’s say you have a bunch a stalks...chop them up and freeze them. (They will go limp and sodden, so any additional liquid in a recipe will have to be reduced.) Like Frankenstein abandoned at the North pole, they won’t go anywhere until you feel like cooking them. I’m pretty sure.

In American desserts rhubarb is usually smothered muffin batter or buried in a crumble or teamed with strawberries and tarmacked with pie crust, to disguise its greyish (when overcooked), celery-like character. It sure ain’t purty, but it tastes good.

My Granny once insisted that I take home one of her recipe books from a small town in North Dakota, put out by a local ladies’ auxiliary club of homemakers. It had been hand typed on a typewriter, and then mimeographed, and was titled: Ravishing Rhubarb Recipes. Perhaps some 120 pages of rhubarb and only rhubarb. Many recipes called for oleo, or for Betty Crocker vanilla cake mix, and at least half of them were for crumbles. All were included, because it would hurt someone’s feelings to be left out.

The book was personally autographed by a local octogenarian Rhubarb Queen who visited my Grandfather every weekend at his strawberry, iris rhizome, and gladiolus stall at the farmers’ market. This gal had been the driving force behind the recipe collection. He emphatically did not want this recipe book to leave with me, but Granny insisted. I think there may be more to the story, but I leave it to you to ponder. Ravishing rhubarb can emit a powerful pull.

I have always heard that uncooked rhubarb is toxic, or at least leads to stomach ache. But here in Germany, country kids ate it raw, dipped in sugar. Even so, here rhubarb is usually cooked with sugar, set atop a crust, and covered over, logically, with a meringue.
Meringue. Pavlova. Bizet. A Bizet is what it is called, here, and pairing it with rhubarb seems like a stroke of natural genius, to me. How better to set off the tangy sourness of the fruit, than to surround it with clouds of airy, dissipated sugar? (Recipes yet to come.)
Rhubarb

Nourish is the Word

To begin at the beginning. Enchanted cooking must begin by deeply feeling the first experiences we have of being nourished on earth. In our mothers’ wombs, the nourishment comes into us directly, we don’t have to seek it or cry for it. But after we are born, we begin to acquire experiences of nourishment, which are either holistic and loving, or can be fraught with the static passed on by those who feed us.

Being fed our mothers’ milk is the first experience of intense worldly intimacy we experience. As Stephanie Demetrakopoulos writes in The Nursing Mother and Feminine Metaphysics,
“The flowing of the milk is a holistic bodily metaphor for maternal caritas, an open, nurturing world love.”

She writes of the holy union that suffuses baby and mother during the act of nourishment.

“There is nothing like the monumental status of the filled, often dozing baby and the relief of the previously taut breast; being and becoming merge in a concrete way. As the mother lets go of her own ego, identifying instead with the baby’s satisfaction, she may feel a sense of total unity with the child that is not unlike the more mystical moments of pregnancy. The gradual relaxation of the infant and the mother is a form of mysterium conjunctio, both psychic and physical unification.”

This is the ideal. I breastfed my three children, and while each child was a wholly individual drinker, I experienced a tranquillity and timelessness during breastfeeding that was deeply meditative and nourishing to both of us.

But sometimes, things go wrong: especially when the child begins to eat table food. Our caregivers don’t intend to traumatize us during feeding, but in the hurry of daily life, and with unconscious patterns dominating their behaviors, it is exactly what can happen.

I was once called to bless a woman with a spoonful of ritual food during a ceremony. I was to gently feed the sacred food into her mouth, and she was meant to accept it. But as I advanced, I could feel her fear of being dominated, a fear that I would feed her unkindly, a shame that people around us would see her being fed. I knew at once that she had rarely, if ever, been fed with love. I mean, whoever fed her did not consciously feed her lovingly, with tenderness, with the intention of nourishing this beautiful soul. I could see this grown woman as a small child, doubtful and afraid of feeling violated while being fed. It is a violation to feed a baby, a child, without tenderness, without sensitivity, without presence.

A man I know used to gobble his food terribly. If you sat behind him in a movie theatre, as he ate his popcorn, you would immediately be struck (sometimes literally) by shrapnel fragments of popcorn madly spinning into a three foot radius of space as he gobbled uncontrollably. At some point he underwent a hypnosis to cure this and found himself sitting as a baby in a high chair, being fed by his mother. One spoonful after the other was jammed into his mouth, and he could barely taste the food, much less take it in and swallow it in a comfortable succession—instead he gasped and choked, gulping for air, and learned to eat as quickly as possible, to get it over with. He could eat nearly an entire meal without breathing.

Uncovering and healing our own “food issues” is the first step to learning how to relate to food as love, and is necessary in enchanting our cooking. Nourishing and being nourished is incomparably intimate, and the emotions that come up in us while either being fed by others or by becoming aware of how we actually feed ourselves will always reveal what composes our inhibitions to intimacy.

As MFK Fisher wrote, “When I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it...and it is all one.”