The up side of rhubarb
Baker puts her unique spin on a recipe she learned at Chez Panisse
In my rural New England hometown, springtime rhubarb was so plentiful that we’d head out to the field with a bowl of sugar, rip the ruby stalks from the ground and dip the ends into the sugar, an afternoon snack.
Teenagers, possessing licenses but little common sense, drove their trucks off-road, bouncing through gulleys and meadows; we called it “taking the truck to the rhubarb,” since chances were good you’d roll over a plant or two on the journey.
The tart vegetable was equally beloved and abundant in Stacie Pierce’s hometown, outside of Minneapolis.
“It lined our driveway,” recalls the chefowner of Little Bee Baking in Bernal Heights. “We’d always dare one another to eat the poisonous leaves, resulting in some stomachaches.”
It’s not a crop that’s grown much in the Bay Area, but the rosy, puckery stalks make their way down from Oregon, and this time of year, while we wait for the best of the strawberries and the summer fruits to follow, it’s a welcome ingredient in the baker’s arsenal.
Pierce moved to the Bay Area in 2000 after attending graduate school in Norway, where she studied Nordic archeology and cooked on the side to make rent. She was lured to San Francisco by the promise of a free apartment and took a job in publishing, which she quickly abandoned, returning to the kitchen with an internship at Oliveto. It was there she met Paul Canales, who told her his wife, Mary Canales, then the pastry chef at Chez Panisse (now the owner of Ici ice cream shop), was looking for an assistant.
“It sounded great,” Pierce recalls, “except that I’d never worked as a pastry chef. My mom and grandmother baked — donuts, sugar cookies, potato lefse — but I’d only worked on the savory side of the kitchen.”
Improbably, Canales hired her, and she went on to spent nine years at Chez Panisse before leaving to open her own bakery, named after her 4-year-old daughter, Charlotte. The accompanying recipe for fruit-topped upside-down cake, which she serves often at Little Bee, is based on one she learned at Chez Panisse.
When you think of upside-down cake, you probably think of pineapple, a cloyingly sweet but beloved version. But rhubarb, its tartness barely cut by a brown sugar caramel, is a sophisticated variation.
As the seasons march on, Pierce substitutes other fruits — apricots, peaches, nectarines and cherries in summer, poached pears and apples in fall, and in winter, citrus and cranberries. The cake itself — with a delicate, tender crumb and gentle vanilla flavor, remains the same year-round.
It’s dessert, to be sure, made more evident if you gussy up each slice with some whipped cream or a scoop of ice cream. But it has a coffeecake-like quality and, owing to the fruit, seems like a perfectly appropriate breakfast, should you find yourself with any leftovers.