Life being as it is, just a couple of days back I was looking at this image from John Leighton’s “London Cries & Public Edifices" published in 1851.
It’s a curious image I think because if you look closely you can
see that the guy’s carrying a pair of scales, and in the text Leighton refers
to rhubarb as a “drug” – so the seller is offering it dried, powdered, as a
laxative? Seems likely.
And then the next day I was reading the Guardian and saw that
Martin Parr has been photographing the rhubarb growers of Yorkshire’s rhubarb
triangle nine-square-mile area between
Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell.
Parr, it think is one of the greatest, most subversive food
photographers ever (not a huge field, I accept) but he did get access – and
access is always half the battle.
Here in southern California we still await the first rhubarb of
the year. It arrives soon I think – the
cashiers in the supermarket never know what it is. It starts out pretty expensive,
then goes pretty cheap, then disappears.
In this age when so many things are available all year round, this feels
like a great bit of seasonality.
Back in the day in Yorkshire, well outside the triangle,
my dad used to grow rhubarb – one of his few horticultural success. I have never had any success whatsoever
trying to grow it.
Meanwhile I await the Proustian arrival of the “local”
crop. There’s some argument about which
parts of Southern Cali – if any – have the necessary chill factor to grow
rhubarb. Some sources say that all the
rhubarb we get in California supermarkets comes from Canada.
And while I wait I’ve been making myself the
occasional martini with the addition of rhubarb bitters, thus:
Nice. We grow rhubarb in our allotment, which is fine and easy. Couple of years ago I bought my partner a rhubarb forcer, which gives you the early, pale sweet stuff you get in the triangle, a lovely treat. Not come across the idea of powdered rhubarb before...
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