RHUBARB DELIGHT
Expert hands fashion tasty cobbler from stems of poisonous plant
Mary Manley out in Huffines will first ask you—very politely—if you’d like to try her rhubarb cobbler.
Well, of course you would. Who can resist anything cobbler?
“This rhubarb has come from Alaska. Can’t be grown around here. Too hot,” she says. She recently brought back six gallons of rhubarb from her and husband John’s Alaskan trip.
You get several spoonfuls ladled into your dessert bowl and take a bite. Boy, it is good. Tangy taste with an abundance of sweetness.
About this time, Mary smiles and politely tells you the leaves of this plant are poisonous.
One doesn’t know whether to cough up or dial the doctor.
“But the cobbler is made using the stems, not the leaves. They’re OK,” Mary says.
Your next thought is, “Wonder how people first found this out? Who got poisoned and who discovered the stems were OK? Nature sure is strange.”
Since you’ve already taken a bite and are still alive, you take a second helping. Rhubarb cobbler is super sweet.
In closing, you thank Mary and praise her cobbler. Forever after, you remember the first time you ate part of a poisonous plant and came through OK.
For the record, the encyclopedia says rhubarb is a vegetable often put to the same culinary uses as fruits. The fleshy, edible stalks are used in cooking, but the large, triangular leaves contain high levels of oxalic acid, making them inedible.
Rhubarb is common in the northwest. The states of Oregon and Washington typically have two harvests and nearly half of all United States production is from Pierce County, Washington.
In recent times, rhubarb has been paired with strawberries to make strawberry-rhubarb pie, but some rhubarb purists jokingly consider this “a rather unhappy marriage.” In traditional Chinese medicine for millennia, rhubarb roots have been thought of as a laxative.