Rhubarb rap, realizations waiting on senior center menu

As a passionate baseball fan growing up in a northern California village, although I didn’t know anyone who’d ever been to Brooklyn, I chose the Dodgers as my team. Radio was my vehicle. There’s no way to describe the thrill of hearing Sandy Koufax strike out 18 players.

Red Barber called the games, and his colorful language included:

• slicker than boiled okra
• tearin’ up the pea patch
• a can of corn.

When players got caught up in a heated on-field dispute, Barber called it a rhubarb, and The Oxford English Dictionary notes that this is Brooklynese for a heated verbal run-in, especially between players and umpires.” (Baseball Magazine, January; David Shulman).

Even rhubarb’s food classification is in dispute, with people arguing whether it’s a fruit or a vegetable. Technically, rhubarb is a vegetable, but legally, since 1947, it’s been a fruit. Then, the U.S. Customs Court at Buffalo, N.Y., ruled that since rhubarb is usually eaten in desserts, it’s a fruit.

Experts tells us the leaves are poisonous, leaving us to wonder why in his gardening book, Thomas Jefferson wrote of cooking them.

But waste not, want not. The website plantcaretoday.com chooses to ignore the fruit-vegetable fray and instead offers “How to Make a Natural Insecticide from Rhubarb Leaves.”

However you term it, those rhubarb stalks have a lot going for them in your diet. High in fiber, the stalks are low in calories, fat, sodium and cholesterol. Those stalks are also a source of vitamins A, C and K and minerals potassium and calcium.

“American Food: What We’ve Cooked, How We’ve Cooked It, and the Ways We’ve Eaten in America Through the Centuries” by Evan Jones offers the recipe for rhubarb Stockli, created by chef Albert Stockli at New York’s Four Seasons in the 1960s. This dish contains one pound diced rhubarb, 3/5 cup Madeira, 1/2 cup dry vermouth and seven egg yolks, as well as sugar, lemon and cubed zweiback.

Drink this and you won’t care whether rhubarb is a fruit or a vegetable.

Scan The New York Times and Washington Post and you’ll find rhubarb is the main ingredient in a wide variety of dishes to start and end the day: Lentil salad with pickled rhubarb, rhubarb stew with lots of mint, barbecued lamb with rhubarb and dandelion stew, fresh tuna (or red snapper or salmon) with tomato rhubarb sauce, fried rhubarb ravioli, rhubarb with duck legs, baked ham, pork loin.

End the meal with chilled rhubarb soup with ice cream.

Get up the next morning and enjoy baked rhubarb French toast.

In a restaurant review, Melissa Clark goes over the top in her enthusiasm, insisting that the food succeeds both intellectually and sensually, “each sardine reclining on a twin bed of rosy rhubarb, simultaneously syrupy and bracingly acidic.”

Last year, a tongue-twisting song about some rhubarb-loving barbarians and a woman named Barbara was a top hit in Germany, with 47 million views on TikTok.

The French are also rhubarb fans. Before the Olympics in 2024, in a lounge next to the finish line of the 100-meter dash at Stade de France rhubarb consommé and smoked eggplant with haddock cream was served — to those willing to pay 8,500 euros.

According to the blurb for “Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug,” this “Asian plant has mysterious cathartic powers. Medicinal rhubarb spurred European trade expeditions and obsessive scientific inquiry from the Renaissance until the twentieth century.”

The author “presents the remarkable efforts of the explorers, traders, botanists, gardeners, physicians and pharmacists who tried to adapt rhubarb for convenient use in Europe … an intriguing tale of how humans and their institutions have been affected by natural realities they do not entirely comprehend. Readers interested in the history of medicine, pharmaceutics, botany, or horticulture will be fascinated by this once-perplexing plant: highly valued by physicians for its cathartic properties.”

I’d pay the $40 plus shipping, to read about “the geographic and economic importance of rhubarb — which explain how the plant became a major state monopoly for Russia and an important commodity for the East India companies — and a discussion of rhubarb’s emergence as an international culinary craze during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

What stops me is not knowing when rhubarb will return to the Charlotte Senior Center and what I’d do with all my newly acquired info until then.

For now, I recommend “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”

Deborah Blum offers a dramatic account of the U.S. Department of Agriculture chief chemist’s tireless campaign for food safety. He conducted the nation’s first food-toxicity trials involving human subjects. It is astounding to read what was added to food: formaldehyde to milk, all manner of nut shells and sawdust to spices, borax to meat, stewed pumpkin rind dyed red to ketchup, ground chalk to baking powder and so on. He — and the invaluable help he received from volunteer food tasters — makes for knock-your-socks-off reading and gratitude for a government employee doing a great job.

Reminder: Take a child you know to The Little Free Library at The Grange, 2858 Spear Street and watch the joy of a child choosing a book to take home.