THE DESSERT VEG

ALSO KNOWN AS THE PIE PLANT, RHUBARB WAS USED AS A FOLK MEDICINE TILL SOME BRIGHT SPARK THOUGHT TO ADD SUGAR

Chris Stafford

Like most of the things we eat, rhubarb has a long and colourful history, much of it shrouded in myth, speculation and mystery. We do know it was used as a medicinal root in ancient Mongolia, Siberia and Ukraine and was well known to the Greeks and Romans as an Asian import that entered Europe via the Silk Road trading route. The Romans called it rheubarbarum — the barbarum part meaning “foreign” — and the name stuck. The plant’s roots were originally dried and used as a laxative and its long journey west made it very expensive. The historical record is hazy about when people began consuming the stems. Nearly two millennia would elapse before a recipe for rhubarb tart turned up in A New System of Domestic Cookery, published…

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Good Organic Gardening (Digital) - 1 Issue, 15.5

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