Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving Day. Two topics came up, in close proximity, which are linked in my mind. Things we should be thankful for but didn’t want and rhubarb. There are all sorts of things in the first category, and for me, rhubarb is one of them. But my husband likes strawberry rhubarb pie and I have offered (not too graciously) to make it for him next time the fruit is seasonal.
Me and rhubarb go back a long way, and it is a hate-hate relationship. When I was a child, my mother would send me out to the rhubarb patch with a paring knife to cut stalks of rhubarb. She would cook the rhubarb as a vegetable, without much sugar in it. We had rhubarb a lot, and I couldn’t bear it. I would look at the little sauce dish of stewed rhubarb by my plate, and my childlike heart would sink. I knew I would have to eat it. I knew I would be miserable all night.
I am one of the few people who can’t digest rhubarb. There are bitter principles in it that make it taste like alum to me. It would sit in my stomach for hours, it seemed, churning and jumping like tadpoles. No amount of doctoring with fruit and sugar made it palatable. I can still taste a minute amount of rhubarb in a prepared dish.
I grew up and never had to eat rhubarb again. I mowed it down in the spring when it would appear behind the old house where I lived. If someone gave me a bag full of it, I thanked them and buried it in the compost within twenty-four hours. I wouldn’t cook it for anyone else, either.
Then, unexpectedly, I became a rhubarb custodian. I had been sent to the church summer camp at the end of the season to clean out the freezers and take the leftover food to a food bank. With the help of another Anglican priest, I loaded boxes of frozen pizza, vegetables and juice into the back of my pickup and covered the lot with old blankets and sleeping bags. I drove upriver to the house where two wonderful and kind Roman Catholic nuns lived and stored donations for the local outreach ministry. My instructions were to let myself into the garage and put the frozen food into the big freezer. Sounds easy!
But the big freezer was full of bags of rhubarb. Cut-up, green and red, chunks of rhubarb. I had no other place to put the frozen food in the truck, and I knew the sisters were counting on it for the Thursday distribution. So I unloaded the rhubarb from the freezer and transferred the food from its boxes into it, then loaded the rhubarb into the boxes, put those into the back of my truck, covered it, and drove off.
Now what to do with about eighty pounds (or more) of frozen rhubarb? I seriously thought about dumping the load in the river, but surely that would cause a fish kill or potable water contamination, so I didn’t do that. My own freezer would hold about a cubic foot of stuff. The Anglican parish next to mine didn’t have a full-sized freezer, either. But it came to me that the Lutheran rectory was vacant and they had a large, empty freezer. I pulled over, took out the cell phone, and called the Lutheran warden, who told me where to find the key to the back door and gave me, the Anglican priest, permission to keep the Roman Catholics’ lifetime supply of rhubarb in the Lutheran freezer.
This whole expedition took me about four hours. I was cold and sore from moving boxes of frozen food in and out of the truck and the freezers. Whatever else I had planned for that day got postponed. I went home for a sustaining little something.
That night I called the sisters. The first question they had was “what did you do with our rhubarb?” I explained. Then I asked, “Sister, what were planning to do with all that rhubarb? You have enough for the whole town! If you give it out all at once, it will end up lowering the water table.”
They would be making jam later, when they had enough jars. Would I be so kind as to bring it back when they asked? Yes, I would, and yes, I did, about three weeks later. I declined the offer of a gift of rhubarb jam.
Just some information about rhubarb: Don’t eat the leaves! They are quite poisonous. The root is, shall we say in technical terms, purgative. Obviously, some of that effect is evident in the edible stalk.
