A TANGY TASTE OF CHILDHOOD
It’s not foolish to love this quick, easy rhubarb and whipped cream dessert
Summers growing up were spent with my grandparents on their acreage on Galiano Island, just off the B.C. coast.
There was room to run around and a nearby beach that, when old enough, we were allowed to venture to on our own for lazy sunbathing and paddling in the frigid Pacific, waiting for the crash of waves from passing ferries.
We were expected to help with chores, of course. Weeding the garden and watering tomato plants, picking buckets of raspberries from the tangle of vines, or blackberries from the wild bushes lining the road. Those berries would be turned into pies or stewed and served over scoops of vanilla ice cream — a summery treat. But when I look back at the desserts that remind me the most of those summers, it’s my grandmother’s Rhubarb Fool.
She had — and still has — a thicket of rhubarb that flourishes each year. The dark green leaves create a lush, shadowed cover, hiding the nearly fuchsia pink stalks growing thickly underneath.
My best friend, who lives in Victoria, has a similar patch in her backyard. The difference between these two is that my grandmother still harvests hers, cleans and chops it for pies and bars all year long. (Or, even better, stews it with water and sugar, creating a syrup she uses in vodka cocktails.) My friend, who has no real interest in baking or cooking, lets hers grow with abandon but does nothing with those precious pink stalks.
So, on a recent trip to the coast, I asked if I could help myself, harvesting a huge bundle in the afternoon sunshine, then chopping it into chunks before putting them in zip-top bags and bringing them back to Calgary — a tasty souvenir from the Island.
I haven’t had fool in years. Probably not since one of those summers visiting my grandparents when my grandmother took some of her rhubarb and stewed it into a pink purée before mixing it with whipped cream. Still, I couldn’t get the idea of it out of my head, knowing I had a bag of rhubarb in my fridge.
Sifting through recipes, I found many try to make what is a very simple dessert overly fussy, calling for stewed berries, crushed cookies, the addition of crystallized ginger or white chocolate. Fool, a quintessential English dish has traditionally been made with gooseberries, moving away from the original custard combination to one that combines sweet-sharp fruit with plain whipped cream. It is the simplicity that allows rhubarb’s signature taste to shine, its tartness tempered with a bit of sugar and the richness of cream.
Rhubarb Fool is a soothing, nostalgia-inducing treat. And one that is dangerously easy to make.
With just a few minutes of effort, I had the rhubarb stewed and cooling. My mixer did all the work churning whipping cream into fluffy clouds of whipped cream. And then it was just a matter of folding the two together, creating light pink streaks through the pale cream. It even calls for not much stirring — my preference, at least — so those lines of pink remain distinct instead of coming together to create a faint overall blush. (Though you may, of course, mix more, if you like.)
That first bite transported me back to my grandmother’s dining room table where we’d sit for every dinner, hungry and tired from being out in the sun all day. It made me wish I had been on the beach all afternoon, paddling in the water and bobbing over those ferry-created waves. But it, at least, tasted a little like I had.