The first time I had rhubarb sauce that actually tasted like something, I was sitting at the bar of a converted barn outside Wakefield, watching the chef pull a small saucepan off the burner with a wooden spoon. He had been experimenting between courses. There were maybe nine of us in the room.
It was late April. Raining sideways the way it does in Yorkshire in spring. I had taken a slow train up from London with a loose plan to drive through the Rhubarb Triangle, that strip of land between Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell where rhubarb has been forced under dark sheds since the 1800s. I am not a person who plans wine bar stops on a Tuesday afternoon. I was looking for a pot of tea and somewhere dry to wait out the worst of it.
What I got instead was a bowl of stewed rhubarb spooned over a slab of cold yogurt panna cotta, and the chef leaning across the counter to ask what I thought.
I thought a lot of things. Mostly that I had been eating bad rhubarb my whole life.
The Wine Bar Outside Wakefield
The chef, who said his name was Tom, told me the trick to rhubarb sauce is to stop treating it like jam. Jam is cooked long and hard with pectin and a mountain of sugar until it sets. Sauce is the opposite. You want it loose. You want chunks. You want the rhubarb to slump but not surrender.
He had stopped adding water years ago, he said. Rhubarb is 97 percent water already. Adding more just dilutes the flavor and turns the color from coral pink to a sad washed-out grey.
He wrote his rough method on the back of a wine list and slid it across. I still have it. The handwriting is honestly terrible.
What Rhubarb Sauce Actually Is
Once I got home I did the reading, because that is what I do after a trip. Rhubarb itself came out of Siberia and northwest China over two thousand years ago, where the root was used as medicine, not food. The English were the ones who first decided to cook with the stalks. Maria Rundell put one of the earliest published rhubarb recipes in her 1807 book on domestic cookery, and by 1822 rhubarb was selling at markets along the American Eastern Seaboard under the nickname pie plant.
In farmhouse kitchens across New England and the upper Midwest, especially Amish and Mennonite ones, rhubarb sauce was a thrift project. Spring rhubarb came up early and fast. You stewed it loose and canned the rest of the harvest for the year ahead. Scandinavians did the same thing under different names, rabarbersoppa and raparperikiisseli, and tied it to grandmothers and summer cottages.
Two things people get wrong about it. Rhubarb is botanically a vegetable, not a fruit. And the leaves are toxic, full of oxalic acid, so they always go straight in the bin.
What I Used
- 1.5 lb fresh rhubarb stalks, the pinker the better, leaves discarded
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar, more or less depending on how mean the stalks are
- 1 tsp lemon zest, from a real lemon and not the bottled stuff
- 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
- A generous pinch of freshly grated nutmeg, around an eighth of a teaspoon
- A pinch of fine sea salt
- 2 tablespoons of water, but only if the rhubarb looks dry after sitting with the sugar
I get my rhubarb at the Hollywood Farmers Market when it shows up in late March. The woman at the Weiser Family Farms stall always has the most aggressive pink stalks. She charges what she charges. I do not argue.
Making the Rhubarb Sauce at Home
The kitchen on a Sunday morning in April. Sun coming in low through the window over the sink, the wooden table getting all the warm light, a small puddle of pink water already collecting on the cutting board. I had Gillian Welch on the speaker, which is the right music for this. Rhubarb is a slow ingredient even when it is fast.
I chopped the stalks crosswise into half-inch pieces and dumped them into my stainless steel saucepan, the one without the chipped enamel. Do not use aluminum or bare cast iron here. Rhubarb is acidic enough to react with the metal and turn the whole sauce the color of dishwater.
I sprinkled the sugar over the top, gave it one stir, and walked away for twenty minutes. This is the step most recipes skip and it is the most important one. The sugar pulls the juice out of the stalks. You come back to a pile of rhubarb already sitting in its own pink syrup. No water needed.
Then the lemon zest, the lemon juice, the nutmeg, the salt. Heat to medium, stir twice, drop it to medium-low. Ten to fifteen minutes of gentle cooking, stirring every couple of minutes, very gently. The first time I made this at home I got impatient and stirred too hard and ended up with rhubarb mush. Restraint matters.
Pull it off the heat the moment the stalks slump and go translucent at the edges but still hold their shape. It will look thin. It is not. It thickens hard as it cools.
How I Serve It Now
The bowl Tom served me in Wakefield was sauce over panna cotta. At home I do it differently. Cold over plain Greek yogurt for breakfast. Warm over vanilla ice cream after dinner. Spooned next to a slab of roast pork shoulder, where the sourness cuts through the fat in a way no apple sauce ever has.
The variations are simple. Two extra tablespoons of water at the start give you a looser, more pourable sauce, more like a coulis. Swap the nutmeg for a split vanilla pod and you get something that reads more dessert. A teaspoon of grated ginger pushes it toward roast meat territory. I almost always reach for the nutmeg. Actually no. Lately I have been doing the ginger version more, with pork.
I keep it in a jar in the fridge for up to ten days. It never lasts that long.
One Last Thing
I have not made it back to Yorkshire since that April. I keep meaning to. There is a version of me who books that train again, finds the converted barn, and tells Tom that his sauce travels well. There is another version who just keeps making it on Sunday mornings in her own kitchen, with the pink syrup running and Gillian Welch playing, and decides that is enough.
Rhubarb Sauce
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Rinse the rhubarb stalks under cold water and pat dry. Trim and discard the leafy tops and any tough or woody ends. The leaves are toxic and must not be used.
- Slice the stalks crosswise into pieces about 1/2 inch thick. You should have roughly 5 cups of cut rhubarb.
- Place the rhubarb in a medium stainless steel or enameled saucepan and sprinkle the sugar evenly over the top. Stir once, then let it sit undisturbed for 20 minutes so the sugar draws out the juices.
- Add the lemon zest, lemon juice, nutmeg, and pinch of salt. Only add the 2 tablespoons of water if the rhubarb looks dry and has not released much juice.
- Set the pan over medium heat and bring to a gentle simmer, stirring once or twice to dissolve the sugar.
- Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook uncovered for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring gently every couple of minutes. The stalks should soften, slump, and partially break down, but you want visible chunks remaining. Do not stir hard or you will mash it into a puree.
- Pull the pan off the heat as soon as the rhubarb is tender. It will look loose and watery at this point; it thickens noticeably as it cools.
- Taste and adjust with a little more sugar if the rhubarb was especially tart, stirring just until dissolved in the residual heat.
- Let the sauce rest in the pan for 15 minutes, then transfer to a clean glass jar or bowl. Serve warm, at room temperature, or chilled.