The Fleeting Days of Rhubarb
A missing recipe. Food + Art. One month of the Roots Of It All!
These are the *fleeting* days of rhubarb everything. My mom made an excellent rhubarb coffee cake recently and I’ve been on a crumble kick, the last two iterations rhubarb-forward. First, a rhubarb gooseberry combo, which was not my favorite. I sent some home with a friend, and after I had a bite sent her a text saying “I don’t know how I feel about the gooseberries - they remind me of…sour peas?!” She followed up by telling me she thought I had snuck peas in the crumble to trick my kids - she’d forgotten about the gooseberries. All of this to say, I’m going to leave rhubarb alone for a while. As in, let it stand alone, because it alone - combined with pie crust - is enough to hold up as a core childhood memory of mine.
In the very first newsletter we talked about the tomato’s lead role in my food story. Rhubarb is something else that comes to the forefront of my mind when I think about what shapes how and what I eat. But it’s been cast in an interesting way: rhubarb only appeared in one dish throughout my childhood - my grandmother’s rhubarb pie - and though the pie only appeared on the table spontaneously throughout the year, it shapes her memory so vividly in my mind. I don't remember the first time I tried it. I just remember always having loved it. And her.
After my grandmother died I felt called to bake this pie to honor her memory. It was October - well outside of rhubarb’s regular season - but I reached out to a local farmer to see if he had any left. (the idea of frozen rhubarb had slipped my mind for some reason.) He graciously let me take what he had, and it was just enough - I thought - so I went to her recipe box and… couldn’t find it there. I think I made rhubarb jam, or something, I don’t really remember - but what I do know is that it's been nearly six years and we have yet to recover the recipe. My mom thinks she never wrote it down; but I’m holding out hope! I’ve also yet to make a rhubarb pie using any other recipe. I keep her memory alive in the kitchen with rhubarb preserves on biscuits and rhubarb crumble, eaten with her (rhubarb) pink handled silverware. And I can only hope someday with her rhubarb pie!
Thumbing through my own food stories makes me think of all of yours, and of our Kitchen Americana project. Each cookbook paints a picture of its community, told though the lens food, and when I read them it makes me wonder: is someone out there looking for this family recipe? You know I want to know more.
I’ll leave you with this question: What recipes call out to you in the form of a memory? Is there one you’re looking for, too? Please share them, if you’d like - we’d love to know your story!
Who else is eating watermelon from a Central Dairy ice cream bucket this summer? This is likely a decidedly mid-Missouri thing. (And maybe it’s just me who’s actually eating it directly from the bucket.) I remember my grandparents using these buckets for lots of things, including leftovers. But as a kid I’d also haul small (though they felt massively heavy) loads of dirt in them to “help” in the garden.
We can’t go without mentioning the bucket’s intended purpose of holding the famed Central Dairy ice cream. Ours is usually vanilla, and we’ll dress it up as a root beer float, with sprinkles and chocolate sauce, or my favorite - rhubarb preserves. We live just outside of walking distance from Central Dairy. Maybe it’s technically within walking distance - but this is a city of hills. It’s a favorite family stop, and we are obviously not the only ones who think so. Lines are often out the door and have been for the last 90 years that the shop has been open. We stop in when we find ourselves with a bucket full of watermelon instead of ice cream. And we’ll probably go this week, because while we were outside watching the entertainment that is trash pickup day, our trash truck driver stopped outside, waved us down and brought over two vouchers for free Central Dairy ice cream - just for the kids. It was an out of the blue gesture of kindness that I've been thinking about every day since.
Rhubarb Tarte Tatin
Gaby is an ambassador for Read It And Eat Box, a subscription box that pairs a book with a snack. It also has a food justice tie in: Each Read It & Eat box includes a donation component to fight hunger.
From Gaby: I’m thrilled to partner with @readitandeatbox to share their Blind Date With A Book Box! 🎉 This box surprised me with a copy of “Death and Croissants” by Ian Moore accompanied by a bag of Better Sour gummy candy from @eatbettersour - the perfect pairing! 🤩
Not only do you get a handpicked book & gourmet treats, but $1 from every box sold fights hunger in Western New York 🙌. Inspired by the novel and the way the author wove together the beauty of France, the joy of food, and the thrill of the mystery, I baked a Rhubarb Tarte Tatin (recipe link in bio!) using fresh garden rhubarb 🍰️ Get your own surprise box & join me in supporting a great cause!
Watch Gaby bake this beautiful tarte here. Feeling inspired to make one yourself? Find the recipe over on the Leftovers Community blog.
Good food + good people
Food + Art at Columbia Art League’s Summer Show
This is food-adjacent - maybe more like food inspired - but I felt strongly about including it here because I also used to include wheel throwing on my list of hobbies (I’ll get back to it someday). Plus, the combination of food and art is superb. My friend Rachel (who is also a part of my tomato plant community) just dropped this gorgeous milkshake vase off at the Columbia Art League’s summer show. I’m always so amazed by her work, and I know someone very lucky is going to get to add this to their collection. Maybe that’s you!
2024 James Beard Awards
Last night’s James Beard Media Awards ceremony dubbed a deserving bunch of food media creatives - food authors, broadcast producers, hosts, journalists, podcasters, and social media content creators - with top honors. If you’re not familiar with the awards, here’s a snippet from the James Beard Foundation: the James Beard Awards are among the nation’s most prestigious honors recognizing leaders in the culinary and food media industries, and those in the broader food systems. For us in the world of food, this is a big deal.
So here’s a congratulations to all winners (and nominees) and especially to Hetty Lui McKinnon and her latest cookbook, Tenderheart: A book about vegetables and unbreakable family bonds, which won the vegetable-focused cooking category. I only shared a small snippet of a day during my panel with Hetty (and Stacey Mei Yan Fong and Crystal Wilkinson!) during this year’s Unbound Book Festival, but it was immediately apparent how much of her personality and story shine through in this book. When you read and cook from Tenderheart, it’s almost like you’re sharing a meal with Hetty. I got to know this book while preparing for the panel, and it really has changed the way I think about vegetables. And my summer garden outlook is so much brighter because of it! I can’t wait to write about eggplant everything when my plants begin to fruit.
Hetty shared her recipe for ginger rhubarb upside down cake a couple weeks ago ahead of Tenderheart’s first birthday in the U.S. We’re all living in the rhubarb universe here!
Leftovers Community Market!
We are working on the Leftovers Community Market, where your purchase will fund our story and recipe development! I ordered a sample shirt - in the color “butter” of course - and I like how it’s turned out. What do you want to see in our market? Shirts, recipe books (as in: books to hold your recipes - no cookbooks yet, but I’ll never say never!)? Hats? Tote bags? Tea towels? We’ve been brainstorming - join us!
A month of The Roots Of It All
As evidenced by this late night newsletter, this week has not been well suited to writing. I shared this meme to my Instagram story recently and it has felt especially true as I sat down to write this week’s newsletter earlier today. I try not to do this - the whole point of a Sunday drop is to have it written before Sunday, but….such is motherhood, and entrepreneurship, and the lives of us who feel the need to quilt words together for y’all to read. Sometimes, you have to put down your computer to put your feet in the kiddie pool with your children when they ask - these are the days, after all! Anyway, I’m really glad to be here, with y’all, in this space. Here’s to one month, to community building around food, and to the roots of it all - not just the newsletter, but everything that’s brought us here together. Cheers!
That’s it for this week. See you back here next Sunday (before sunset this time, I hope) with more food + story.
This may not be your grandmother's rhubarb pie, but it's really good. It's from a 1970s Betty Crocker with my own modifications. I'll let you decide what type of pie crust. We prefer ATK's butter crust.
20 ounces of 1/2 inch cut pieces of fresh rhubarb--to achieve the lovely piquant flavor I highly recommend only using rhubarb harvested before June 1st in MO.
1 1/2 cup sugar mixed with 1/3 cup flour
2 T butter
Put half of rhubarb in pie crust and sprinkle with half of sugar/flour mixture, repeat and then cover with top crust with slits.
Bake at 425 with tinfoil over the edges. Bake until brown and juice is visibly bubbling through slits. about 40-50".
I think that rhubarb fell out of favor for a while, so lots of the recipes are pretty old. But it seems to be making a comeback! If you have lots and like Greek yogurt, stew some with sugar and mix it into the yogurt with some toasted walnuts. The flavors are REALLY complimentary. In the spring, I often stew it and can it so I have more room in my freezers for other tasty things!