A bouquet of rhubarb
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Dear Valued Customer,
Under the apple trees in the basse-cour, tremulous violet bells of fritillaria have begun to open. Early clematis, like delicate white lace, blossoms against the stone of barn walls. The young magnolias are budding out in the parc.
And neighbors who came for dinner last week carried a bouquet of rhubarb.
Spring is almost here. If tender blossoms are a feast for the eyes and nose, la rhubarbe is the first of its edible fruits.
The stalks of this rhubarb are delicate, thin, and a deep rose red. They will, as Monsieur has suggested, make a fine tarte à la rhubarbe, served -- pourquoi pas? -- with a fresh crème anglaise. Afterwards, enough stems should remain for a little jar of conserves.
“And that potager you’re working on,” he added. “Why don’t you plant some for us?”
As mentioned last week, I have been turning over in my mind a plan for a new potager at Courtomer. The Chateau’s kitchen garden in days of yore had been behind the stable block. It is an immense space that we now use as a hay field. Even with Monsieur Martyn’s willing hands and a rototiller, the reintroduction of vegetables and fruit must proceed with judicious, even extreme, restraint. And rhubarb is but a relative newcomer to the French table.
It was les Anglais across the channel who first experimented in the kitchen with the barbaric root, Rheum rhabarbarum.
“Devant la cuisine anglaise, il n’y a qu’un seul mot: soit !” sighed Paul Claudel.
The man of letters had given a series of lectures in England in the 1920s.
“English cooking? One must resign oneself.”
By that time, culinary rhubarb was widely cultivated in the British Isles, as common an ingredient as brown sauce and treacle.
The first rhubarb tart recipe appears in a 1739 letter to the Philadelphia botanist John Bartram from Peter Collinson, London merchant and distinguished fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of sciences. Rhubarb, he urges, will “make excellent tarts, before most other Fruits fitt for that purpose are ripe.” Printed recipes in British and American cookbooks appeared from 1807.
French cooks were reluctant. Rhubarb was not for eating.
“Passez-moi la rhubarbe, je vous passerai le séné.”
“Pass me the rhubarb, I’ll pass you the senna” is a hoary dicton that captures all the “mauvais esprit” of a false and hypocritical friendliness. Both rhubarb root and senna leaf are time-honored remedies for constipation. Evidemment, if you already have one laxative, you certainly don’t want another.
Rheum rhabarbarum is native to Central Asia. It made its way across the Black Sea to the apothecary gardens of ancient Greece and Rome. Its Latin name rheubarbarum came from Greek words meaning “flow” or “river” and “foreigner.”
Pliny the Elder, naturalist of the early First Century A.D., described the imported root as a cure-all.
Taken in wine or water, powdered rhubarb is good for the usual “gripings of the bowels” as well as “cold shiverings, chilly fevers, hiccup, herpetic ulcerations, oppressions of the head, vertigo attended with melancholy, lassitude accompanied with pain, and convulsions.”
Sprinkled on the skin or applied as a salve, Pliny wrote, it heals wounds and ulcers and reduces swelling.
With all these qualities, perhaps rhubarbe grew in a Roman garden near the present-day site of Courtomer. The Romans conquered Gaul in the 1st Century B.C. They established their architecture, manners, arts, learning, and language in what is now France. But like many accoutrements of refined life, medicine and rhubarb were largely forgotten in the turbulence of barbarian raids and conquests as the Roman Empire declined and fell.
Libraries in Byzantium, the former Empire of the East, conserved the works of Pliny and his contemporaries, however. For the next 800 years, the capital city of Constantinople, with its monastic and private collections of scrolls and books, its scriptoria and community of scholars, its gardens and plant collections, was safe behind defensive walls.
The world of the defunct Western Empire had been cut off from the heritage of Greek medicine. But Persian and Arab scholars in the East continued to read, translate, copy, and disseminate the old Greek texts and remedies.
The Muslim Conquest of Spain, beginning in 711, gradually brought these texts back into circulation in Western Europe. A later wave of enlightenment came with Byzantines fleeing the chaotic aftermath of 1204, when Constantinople was sacked. These exiles taught a generation of Italian, German and French scholars to read Greek and study the ancient texts they had carried away with them.
The works of Pliny, Dioscorides, Theophrastes and others who had written about rhubarb’s marvelous curative powers were rapidly translated into Latin. Medical information became available in the vernacular, too: a “Livre des Remèdes” from the 13th century cites rheubarb, the Old French word for rhubarb, among other drugs for the medieval healer.
At about the same time, Europe’s first explorers, merchants and missionaries were venturing East. Fifty years before Marco Polo arrived in Cathay from Venice, Saint Louis of France sent an envoy to the Golden Horde. In 1253, Guillaume de Rubrouk crossed the Volga River and penetrated into Mongolia. He met with polite refusal when he offered to convert the Great Khan to Christianity. But he returned to France with a full description of the foreign empire of the steppes, including the presence of a French silversmith and an Alsacian cook in the Mongol city. Already, caravans regularly brought silk and spices, including rhubarb root, from central Asia through Russia and into Europe.
An illustration of rhubarb from the "De materia medica" of Dioscorides. The illusttation was made in the 6th Century A.D., The writings of this 1st-century physician were widely circulated and studied for almost 2,000 years.
The quest for knowledge gleaned from old texts and from new discoveries mingled, naturally, with man’s eternal quest for better health.
Along with a multitude of herbiers and livres de remèdes now available in French, apothecary gardens of medicinal plants flourished during the late Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the first botanical garden was created in Padua in 1545. Here, the great Venetian botanist Prosper Alpinus planted rhubarb from seed in 1608.
Rhubarb quickly found a useful place in the medical theory of the “humours.” The concept of four bodily fluids whose imbalance causes disease and mental illness had been proposed by Hippocrates in the 4th Century B.C. Renaissance physicians continued to develop the model. Special diets, bleeding and purging were used to build up or let out various humours.
“Ah ! Nourrice de mon cœur, je suis ravi de cette rencontre, et votre vue est la rhubarbe, la case, et le séné qui purgent toute la mélancholie de mon âme,”
cries the roguish Sganarelle. He impersonates a doctor in Molière’s 1660 play, “Le Médecin malgré lui.” He has just met his young patient’s charming nursemaid.
“Nurse of my heart! I am thrilled to meet you, and the sight of you is as rhubarb, cassia, and senna to purge all the melancholy from my soul!”
Love at first sight might not always be a laxative. But rhubarb was so reliable in its effects that it became one of the most princely “spices” in Europe. In the 1500s, it was ten times more costly than cinnamon and four times more precious than saffron. Although the plant grew in European gardens, the most cathartic root still came from the Asian hinterland. Caravans carried it through Russia, which soon established a monopoly on the rhubarb trade. Only the dried root could be sold. Taking seeds out of the country was punishable by death.
Yet the allure of rhubarb proved irresistible. In 1762, Catherine the Great’s Scottish doctor obtained imperial permission to leave St. Petersburg. In his baggage were rhubarb seeds. He started plants himself and shared them with fellow naturalists in Edinburg and Kew. And it was said that he slept with a loaded gun.
Despite his fear of Russian assassins, Mounsey died a natural death several years later. By this time, rhubarb seeds of various species were being swapped by an enthusiastic network of international merchants and plant collectors throughout Europe. Linnaeus had published his “Systema Naturae” in 1735. The great enterprise of categorizing, classifying and naming the flora and fauna of the world had begun. Scientific societies encouraged botanical study and experiments in agronomy. Mounsey himself was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce “for introducing the seed of the true rhubarb.” The country could save £1 million a year, it was estimated, if “Russian” rhubarb could be grown in Britain.
Dr. James Mounsey won a gold medal for introducing the "true rhubarb" to the British Isles. He smuggled the seeds out of Russia under pain of death.
In the Jardin du Roy in Paris, Mounsey’s contemporary, the botanist Bernard de Jussieu, also had received rhubarb seeds from Moscow. Unfortunately, Jussieu observed, his plantations were “bien inférieures” to “la vraie rhubarbe.”
From London, where he was also a fellow of the Royal Society, the abbé Raynal sent Mounsey’s seeds to his friend, the chemist and agronome Duhamel de Monceau. The latter duly published his “Observations sur la vraie rhubarbe cultivée et élevée à Édimbourg.” Duhamel’s experiments demonstrated that the Edinburg rhubarb was as effective a remedy as “la vraie rhubarbe.” Henceforth, France could be self-sufficient in powdered rhubarb root.
Meanwhile, the enterprising English and Scots were turning their scientific minds to rhubarb’s potential as a food.
Perhaps this interest was due to the practical nature of l’esprit anglo-saxon. Perhaps it was the Age of Enlightenment’s desire to alleviate the ills of the world through scientific progress and rational thought. Or perhaps it was simply the uninspired state of English and Scottish cuisine. Collinson in London, Bartram in Philadelphia and others circulated recipes. Thomas Jefferson ate the leaves stewed like spinach. (A practice peu commendable, as the leaves are poisonous.)
In France, on the other hand, the upheavals of the Revolution and its aftermath had seemingly dulled a taste for innovation in the kitchen. In 1805, Le Bon Jardinier, a French horticultural journal, recommended rhubarb for the home potager. In 1830, the Revue horticole published recipes for compôte and other rhubarb concoctions. Jacques, the royal gardener at Louis-Philippe’s château de Neuilly, was known to be enthusiastic. To no avail; la rhubarbe remained in the medicine cabinet.
Modern culinary rhubarb is a hybrid whose exact parentage, according to botanists, is lost in the mists and cross-pollinations of time. Genetically, almost all garden cultivars are still Rheum rhabarbarum, the original barbarian root from beyond the Black Sea.
The first commercially successful eating variety of rhubarb, selected for color, flavor, and sweetness rather than cathartic effects, was produced by the Englishman Joseph Myatt. He was a market gardener and seedsman in Kent,. Named “Victoria” to honor the young queen on her coronation in 1837, Myatt’s cultivar is still a garden and culinary staple.
Various rhubarbs depicted in Vilmorin's 1883 "Les plantes potagères," plants for the kitchen garden.
“Victoria”’s success quickened France’s tentative steps toward la tarte à la rhubarb. The venerable seed company Vilmorin, founded in 1766, had always promoted foreign and exotic varieties. “Myatt’s Victoria” was featured in its 1883 catalogue. This reliable old variety, still sold by Vilmorin today, probably accounts for most of the rhubarb growing in France.
My grandmother’s table was where I learned to appreciate the tart sweetness of rhubarb.
Her recipes, in the file boxes she kept next to the clock on her kitchen mantel, were carefully handed down to me. Unfortunately, they are in a trunk across the ocean.
So yesterday, I improvised. I made a tarte à la rhubarbe using Madame Chantal’s recipe for pâte brisée and a filling from my old French cookbook. It was very good.
“Pass me the rhubarb!” says Monsieur. He puts out his plate for a second helping.
A bientôt au Chateau!
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Dear Valued Customer,
Under the apple trees in the basse-cour, tremulous violet bells of fritillaria have begun to open. Early clematis, like delicate white lace, blossoms against the stone of barn walls. The young magnolias are budding out in the parc.
And neighbors who came for dinner last week carried a bouquet of rhubarb.
Spring is almost here. If tender blossoms are a feast for the eyes and nose, la rhubarbe is the first of its edible fruits.
The stalks of this rhubarb are delicate, thin, and a deep rose red. They will, as Monsieur has suggested, make a fine tarte à la rhubarbe, served -- pourquoi pas? -- with a fresh crème anglaise. Afterwards, enough stems should remain for a little jar of conserves.
“And that potager you’re working on,” he added. “Why don’t you plant some for us?”
As mentioned last week, I have been turning over in my mind a plan for a new potager at Courtomer. The Chateau’s kitchen garden in days of yore had been behind the stable block. It is an immense space that we now use as a hay field. Even with Monsieur Martyn’s willing hands and a rototiller, the reintroduction of vegetables and fruit must proceed with judicious, even extreme, restraint. And rhubarb is but a relative newcomer to the French table.
It was les Anglais across the channel who first experimented in the kitchen with the barbaric root, Rheum rhabarbarum.
“Devant la cuisine anglaise, il n’y a qu’un seul mot: soit !” sighed Paul Claudel.
The man of letters had given a series of lectures in England in the 1920s.
“English cooking? One must resign oneself.”
By that time, culinary rhubarb was widely cultivated in the British Isles, as common an ingredient as brown sauce and treacle.
The first rhubarb tart recipe appears in a 1739 letter to the Philadelphia botanist John Bartram from Peter Collinson, London merchant and distinguished fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of sciences. Rhubarb, he urges, will “make excellent tarts, before most other Fruits fitt for that purpose are ripe.” Printed recipes in British and American cookbooks appeared from 1807.
French cooks were reluctant. Rhubarb was not for eating.
“Passez-moi la rhubarbe, je vous passerai le séné.”
“Pass me the rhubarb, I’ll pass you the senna” is a hoary dicton that captures all the “mauvais esprit” of a false and hypocritical friendliness. Both rhubarb root and senna leaf are time-honored remedies for constipation. Evidemment, if you already have one laxative, you certainly don’t want another.
Rheum rhabarbarum is native to Central Asia. It made its way across the Black Sea to the apothecary gardens of ancient Greece and Rome. Its Latin name rheubarbarum came from Greek words meaning “flow” or “river” and “foreigner.”
Pliny the Elder, naturalist of the early First Century A.D., described the imported root as a cure-all.
Taken in wine or water, powdered rhubarb is good for the usual “gripings of the bowels” as well as “cold shiverings, chilly fevers, hiccup, herpetic ulcerations, oppressions of the head, vertigo attended with melancholy, lassitude accompanied with pain, and convulsions.”
Sprinkled on the skin or applied as a salve, Pliny wrote, it heals wounds and ulcers and reduces swelling.
With all these qualities, perhaps rhubarbe grew in a Roman garden near the present-day site of Courtomer. The Romans conquered Gaul in the 1st Century B.C. They established their architecture, manners, arts, learning, and language in what is now France. But like many accoutrements of refined life, medicine and rhubarb were largely forgotten in the turbulence of barbarian raids and conquests as the Roman Empire declined and fell.
Libraries in Byzantium, the former Empire of the East, conserved the works of Pliny and his contemporaries, however. For the next 800 years, the capital city of Constantinople, with its monastic and private collections of scrolls and books, its scriptoria and community of scholars, its gardens and plant collections, was safe behind defensive walls.
The world of the defunct Western Empire had been cut off from the heritage of Greek medicine. But Persian and Arab scholars in the East continued to read, translate, copy, and disseminate the old Greek texts and remedies.
The Muslim Conquest of Spain, beginning in 711, gradually brought these texts back into circulation in Western Europe. A later wave of enlightenment came with Byzantines fleeing the chaotic aftermath of 1204, when Constantinople was sacked. These exiles taught a generation of Italian, German and French scholars to read Greek and study the ancient texts they had carried away with them.
The works of Pliny, Dioscorides, Theophrastes and others who had written about rhubarb’s marvelous curative powers were rapidly translated into Latin. Medical information became available in the vernacular, too: a “Livre des Remèdes” from the 13th century cites rheubarb, the Old French word for rhubarb, among other drugs for the medieval healer.
At about the same time, Europe’s first explorers, merchants and missionaries were venturing East. Fifty years before Marco Polo arrived in Cathay from Venice, Saint Louis of France sent an envoy to the Golden Horde. In 1253, Guillaume de Rubrouk crossed the Volga River and penetrated into Mongolia. He met with polite refusal when he offered to convert the Great Khan to Christianity. But he returned to France with a full description of the foreign empire of the steppes, including the presence of a French silversmith and an Alsacian cook in the Mongol city. Already, caravans regularly brought silk and spices, including rhubarb root, from central Asia through Russia and into Europe.
An illustration of rhubarb from the "De materia medica" of Dioscorides. The illusttation was made in the 6th Century A.D., The writings of this 1st-century physician were widely circulated and studied for almost 2,000 years.
The quest for knowledge gleaned from old texts and from new discoveries mingled, naturally, with man’s eternal quest for better health.
Along with a multitude of herbiers and livres de remèdes now available in French, apothecary gardens of medicinal plants flourished during the late Middle Ages. Meanwhile, the first botanical garden was created in Padua in 1545. Here, the great Venetian botanist Prosper Alpinus planted rhubarb from seed in 1608.
Rhubarb quickly found a useful place in the medical theory of the “humours.” The concept of four bodily fluids whose imbalance causes disease and mental illness had been proposed by Hippocrates in the 4th Century B.C. Renaissance physicians continued to develop the model. Special diets, bleeding and purging were used to build up or let out various humours.
“Ah ! Nourrice de mon cœur, je suis ravi de cette rencontre, et votre vue est la rhubarbe, la case, et le séné qui purgent toute la mélancholie de mon âme,”
cries the roguish Sganarelle. He impersonates a doctor in Molière’s 1660 play, “Le Médecin malgré lui.” He has just met his young patient’s charming nursemaid.
“Nurse of my heart! I am thrilled to meet you, and the sight of you is as rhubarb, cassia, and senna to purge all the melancholy from my soul!”
Love at first sight might not always be a laxative. But rhubarb was so reliable in its effects that it became one of the most princely “spices” in Europe. In the 1500s, it was ten times more costly than cinnamon and four times more precious than saffron. Although the plant grew in European gardens, the most cathartic root still came from the Asian hinterland. Caravans carried it through Russia, which soon established a monopoly on the rhubarb trade. Only the dried root could be sold. Taking seeds out of the country was punishable by death.
Yet the allure of rhubarb proved irresistible. In 1762, Catherine the Great’s Scottish doctor obtained imperial permission to leave St. Petersburg. In his baggage were rhubarb seeds. He started plants himself and shared them with fellow naturalists in Edinburg and Kew. And it was said that he slept with a loaded gun.
Despite his fear of Russian assassins, Mounsey died a natural death several years later. By this time, rhubarb seeds of various species were being swapped by an enthusiastic network of international merchants and plant collectors throughout Europe. Linnaeus had published his “Systema Naturae” in 1735. The great enterprise of categorizing, classifying and naming the flora and fauna of the world had begun. Scientific societies encouraged botanical study and experiments in agronomy. Mounsey himself was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce “for introducing the seed of the true rhubarb.” The country could save £1 million a year, it was estimated, if “Russian” rhubarb could be grown in Britain.
Dr. James Mounsey won a gold medal for introducing the "true rhubarb" to the British Isles. He smuggled the seeds out of Russia under pain of death.
In the Jardin du Roy in Paris, Mounsey’s contemporary, the botanist Bernard de Jussieu, also had received rhubarb seeds from Moscow. Unfortunately, Jussieu observed, his plantations were “bien inférieures” to “la vraie rhubarbe.”
From London, where he was also a fellow of the Royal Society, the abbé Raynal sent Mounsey’s seeds to his friend, the chemist and agronome Duhamel de Monceau. The latter duly published his “Observations sur la vraie rhubarbe cultivée et élevée à Édimbourg.” Duhamel’s experiments demonstrated that the Edinburg rhubarb was as effective a remedy as “la vraie rhubarbe.” Henceforth, France could be self-sufficient in powdered rhubarb root.
Meanwhile, the enterprising English and Scots were turning their scientific minds to rhubarb’s potential as a food.
Perhaps this interest was due to the practical nature of l’esprit anglo-saxon. Perhaps it was the Age of Enlightenment’s desire to alleviate the ills of the world through scientific progress and rational thought. Or perhaps it was simply the uninspired state of English and Scottish cuisine. Collinson in London, Bartram in Philadelphia and others circulated recipes. Thomas Jefferson ate the leaves stewed like spinach. (A practice peu commendable, as the leaves are poisonous.)
In France, on the other hand, the upheavals of the Revolution and its aftermath had seemingly dulled a taste for innovation in the kitchen. In 1805, Le Bon Jardinier, a French horticultural journal, recommended rhubarb for the home potager. In 1830, the Revue horticole published recipes for compôte and other rhubarb concoctions. Jacques, the royal gardener at Louis-Philippe’s château de Neuilly, was known to be enthusiastic. To no avail; la rhubarbe remained in the medicine cabinet.
Modern culinary rhubarb is a hybrid whose exact parentage, according to botanists, is lost in the mists and cross-pollinations of time. Genetically, almost all garden cultivars are still Rheum rhabarbarum, the original barbarian root from beyond the Black Sea.
The first commercially successful eating variety of rhubarb, selected for color, flavor, and sweetness rather than cathartic effects, was produced by the Englishman Joseph Myatt. He was a market gardener and seedsman in Kent,. Named “Victoria” to honor the young queen on her coronation in 1837, Myatt’s cultivar is still a garden and culinary staple.
Various rhubarbs depicted in Vilmorin's 1883 "Les plantes potagères," plants for the kitchen garden.
“Victoria”’s success quickened France’s tentative steps toward la tarte à la rhubarb. The venerable seed company Vilmorin, founded in 1766, had always promoted foreign and exotic varieties. “Myatt’s Victoria” was featured in its 1883 catalogue. This reliable old variety, still sold by Vilmorin today, probably accounts for most of the rhubarb growing in France.
My grandmother’s table was where I learned to appreciate the tart sweetness of rhubarb.
Her recipes, in the file boxes she kept next to the clock on her kitchen mantel, were carefully handed down to me. Unfortunately, they are in a trunk across the ocean.
So yesterday, I improvised. I made a tarte à la rhubarbe using Madame Chantal’s recipe for pâte brisée and a filling from my old French cookbook. It was very good.
“Pass me the rhubarb!” says Monsieur. He puts out his plate for a second helping.
A bientôt au Chateau!
P.S. If you would like to forward this email to a friend, please click here.
Here is my recipe for “Tarte à la rhubarbe.”
Pâte brisée (plain pie crust)
Ingredients
150 grams flour
75 grams butter, somewhat soft, cut into small chunks
“Demi-verre” of water – about 1/4 cup or 50ml
In a bowl, mix the flour and butter with your fingers until well-blended.
Add the water, and blend again.
The dough should just barely cling together in a ball in your hands.
Roll out or press the dough firmly into the pie plate.
Rhubarb filling
Ingredients
About 10 – 12 stalks
Sugar to taste
Beaten egg
“Verre” of heavy cream or crème fraîche
Wash stalks, cut off discolored area. The tender petioles of spring rhubarb need not be peeled. Slice into pieces about the length and diameter of your little finger. Add a small amount of water and sprinkle with sugar. Boil for 20 minutes, then let sit to draw out the juices.
When cool, add the beaten egg and about half a cup or 100ml of heavy cream or crème fraîche. Mix with rhubarb. Taste; add more sugar if desired.
Pour the mixture over the pastry and place in a moderate oven (about 160 degrees C, 350 degrees F).
Bake for 25 minutes or until pastry is golden brown and filling has set.
Delicious with whipped cream, crème anglaise or ice cream.
P.P.S. At Chateau de Courtomer, we are taking bookings for 2025 and 2026. We still have a few opening for the Chateau, Orangerie and Farmhouse for 2024. Soon, we hope to open our "petite maison," the gatekeeper's cottage.
Heather (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be delighted to help you with your enquiries and dates. And Jane will be happy to preview the property on site. She can also act as your concierge.
English and French spoken.
We look forward to hearing from you.