June is National Dairy Month. (Stick with me.) Last weekend we went to a dairy festival and next Sunday dairy is the theme for the fellowship dinner at church. I thought of making panna cotta — I doubt it’s frequently made and it’s definitely full of dairy. My thought process then went to a topping: strawberries are in season, but other people at church grow them so maybe I should choose something else. We have rhubarb in the freezer and I think rhubarb curd would be a perfect silky topping for panna cotta.
(I must also admit that Andrew played me a YouTube video about the tongue-twisting German rap “Barbara’s Rhubarb Bar” that went viral recently, so that’s another reason rhubarb is on my mind.)
Have you ever thought of the origins of rhubarb? I read several websites and here’s what I learned.
Rhubarb, also known as “pie plant,” is indigenous to northern Asia, growing wild along the Volga River. Its name comes from the Greek “rha” (referring to the Volga) and “barbarum” (referring to the barbarous tribes of the region). It’s possible that it was brought there by Eurasian tribes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Magyars, or Mongols.
Rhubarb had been used in traditional Chinese medicine long before it was described by the ancient Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in De Materia Medica (c. 50 – 70 AD). Its roots have been used as a laxative for thousands of years.
Marco Polo wrote about rhubarb and how merchants traded it around the world in 1271.
It’s unclear when rhubarb reached England, but “Rhabarbarum verum, ‘true Rubarbe'” is listed in Musaeum Tradescantianum, or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South-Lambeth neer London in 1656.
Pennsylvania-born botanist John Bartram (1699-1777) was the first to grow rhubarb in North America. He was sent two types of rhubarb seeds by his friend Peter Collinson of London; a letter from Collinson on September 22, 1739 states that both the Siberian and Rhapontick rhubarb “make excellent tarts before most other Fruits fitt for that purpose are ripe.”
Around the same time, famed naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was growing rhubarb in the Uppsala Academic Garden in Sweden. He oversaw a dissertation on rhubarb written by Samuel Ziervogel. Dissertatio Medico Botanica, Sistens Rhabarbarum (1752) details rhubarb’s therapeutic uses, including its effectiveness in treating diarrhea and dysentery. Rhubarb was also listed in a dissertation by student Samuel Nauclér. In Through the Fields with Linnaeus: a Chapter in Swedish History (1887) Mrs. Florence Caddy says of Linnaeus, “Though he missed the rhubarb stewed with tapioca and served with whipped cream of his own home, he was an old traveler and could do without delicacies.” She also mentions “it is curious to think how late in the day rhubarb became common in England, seeing that in Sweden, even in this out-of-the-way place, they cultivated it one hundred years before we took kindly to it.”
In 1770 Benjamin Franklin, who was living in London at the time, shipped some rhubarb to John Bartram in Philadelphia. It is often stated that rhubarb was introduced to the United States at this time, though as noted above Bartram had received rhubarb seeds from Collinson in the 1730s.
In 1774 the Society of Arts presented a gold medal “for the best specimen of rhubarb” to Sir Alexander Dick, President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, who had received the seeds from James Mounsey, physician to the Czar of Russia.
The first English book on rhubarb may be The Great Importance and Proper Method of Cultivating and Curing Rhubarb in Britain for Medical Uses by London physician Sir William Fordyce (1792).
Rhubarb was also being cultivated for culinary uses. Joseph Myatt, a nurseryman in South London, promoted it in produce markets in 1808 or 1809. Some sources say the first published recipe for rhubarb is found in A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806) by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell (1745-1828). At this time the price of sugar was dropping enough to make baking with rhubarb more affordable. In addition a sweeter, sturdier variety called Victoria rhubarb, in honour of the queen’s coronation, was introduced in 1837.
In the United States rhubarb appeared in New England markets and seed catalogs in the 1820s. Apparently the Boston editions of Maria Rundell’s cookbook help increase rhubarb’s popularity.
This recipe appeared in 1841 in Early American Cookery: “The Good Housekeeper” by Sarah Josepha Hale: “In England they call this ‘Spring fruit,’ which is a much more relishing name than rhubarb. Peel off the skin from the young green stalks, and cut these into small pieces — put them in the pie with plenty of brown sugar, you can hardly put in too much. Cover the pie, and bake like apple.”
In The American Frugal Housewife (1844) Lydia Maria Child wrote, “These are dear pies for they take an enormous quantity of sugar.” However, because stored apples were shriveled or rotten by spring, rhubarb became very popular for pie making in both England and the United States.
One final note on the history of rhubarb: in 1947 the U.S. Customs Court of Buffalo, New York, ruled that rhubarb was a fruit rather than a vegetable, which pleased the importers because the tariffs on fruit were much lower!
Sources
- “Celebrate the Rhubarb” by Julia Blakely via Smithsonian (January 21, 2015)
- “The Rhubarb – A Little History and Some Growing Instructions” via Harvesting History
- “Rhubarb” via New World Encyclopedia
- “Rhubarb Pie” via Revolutionary Pie
- “1947: The Great Rhubarb Controversy” via Barnes/Richardson Global Trade Law