What Comfort Food Really Means

Last week I had to choose between forging on into new and Persian delights of dishes, experimenting with rhubarb as a savory vegetable to be mixed with beef and cooked slowly (Oh, I was confident. Maybe just a little too confident)...or return to rhubarb as a dessert, head held high in forced pride, like a cat who trips awkwardly and tries to pretend she meant to do that by quickly licking her ankle. It is however comforting to know that you can always go home again, because the new recipe was a disaster. DIS. AS. TER.

Well, not entirely.

He said: "I like it. It's something different."

He ate a whole bowl of it, and then another. (It was filled with beef, after all, and he is a Prince.) The rest of us couldn't be brought to finishing ours, nor indeed proceeding beyond bite one. The dish in question was ground beef and onion and rhubarb, over rice. Persian. Iranian. 1001 Nights. Exotic. New to me. It had also needed a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, which sent it jolting over the sourness richter scale. During its preparation, I began to panic. I thought, if I add some chilis and then something sweet, I can make it hot and sour and spicy, and save this trainwreck.

But it just tasted like beef in a lemonade flavor base with rhubarb in it, over rice. And kinda spicy.

The sort of thing a crazy and heartbroken and clueless person bakes for their child to take to the Appreciate Other Cultures potluck, and the poor kid is forced to secretly scrape the pyrex dish out near the staff parking lot in the dark before the buffet even starts and never, ever tell and keep the secret with them forever, beginning with when she asks how they liked it, afterwards.

(Post Persian Beef and Rhubarb experiment. Demoralized and hungry, I would need about two weeks to recover. Still searching for a dish of savory rhubarb. Less avidly, though.)

So I returned to the familiar territory of my youth: the familiar muffin territory, where everybody knows your name. Muffins are cupcakes with chunks added, by the way. Muffins are to stew what cupcakes are to soup. Muffins? Meh. Seen it all, muffin-wise. The big, the mega, the jumbo, the mini (so dry, barely edible) and everything in-between. There are particular organic-Hippie-based, small-mountain-town cafes in Colorado (where all the pierced waitresses have been to Burning Man at least once) that specialize only in muffins, believe me. Raspberry muffins whose floppy innards look like a crime scene. Lemon muffins always but always teamed with poppyseeds. Chocolate chocolate muffins: Hey!! Bleh. What's so special about the muffin?

These rhubarb muffins are different, because here, the tangy zestiness of the rhubarb finds its perfect mate in the sweet and rich lemon vanilla batter. Opposites come together and their dance simply works. It's as if the plainest Jane and Joe at the Arthur Murray Beginner's Course Graduation Night turned out to be able to rock Argentinian Tango like nobody's business. Who knew?

325 degree oven, or 180 in Europe. Use regular size (not jumbo) muffin liners in a muffin pan.

1/2 pound butter (2 US sticks, or 1 Euro block minus 2 Tablespoons)
2 cups granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temp.
2 T lemon zest (just cut very fine sheets of lemon zest away from the rind, taking care to leave all white pith behind, then very finely mince. Please don't buy a special tool for this.)
2 T fresh lemon juice
3 cups chopped fresh rhubarb
3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 t salt
1 cup whole milk

Mix the flour, soda and salt together and set aside. Cream together butter and sugar, then add lemon bits. Mix eggs in one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in half the milk, then mix in the dry flour mixture. End by mixing in the rest of the milk, and then stir in the rhubarb.
Fill muffin liners scantily to the top. (If you like your baked goods really sweet, sprinkle more sugar over the top of the muffins, otherwise they have a pleasantly middle-European subtle sweetness. ) Bake 20ish minutes or so. The muffins should be quite done on the top, very golden brown, and/or check for doneness with a toothpick or skewer.

Also: Stuart took these to his Class Breakfast, and they all disappeared without a trace. I know that they were greedily eaten, because...they are rhubarb muffins and not messed-up Persian Beef with Rhubarb in a lemonade chili sauce.

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