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No Fool Like an Old Fool

Rhubarb Fool

Rhubarb comes ever earlier. The earliest rhubarb I have

seen – the finest, slenderest, most elegant forced Yorkshire

rhubarb – was at the River Café a week before Christmas.

There is nothing we chefs hate more than a rival gaining

an ingredient ahead of them in the season. Since we share

the same greengrocer, I berated him for not telling me

about the rhubarb. He cleverly argued that since I was

such a stickler for seasonality, he didn’t think I would have

thought it right to be serving rhubarb before Christmas.

The River Café were right, of course. Forced rhubarb,

far from being a product of the seasons, exists in defiance

of them. Like radicchio tardivo and sea kale, it is produced

by deceiving nature and encouraging the plants to grow

just when nothing is supposed to grow, at least not in our

latitudes. There is certainly nothing very ‘natural’ about

Yorkshire rhubarb, nor anything particularly attractive

about the triangle, a tiny pocket of land roughly defined

by Wakefield, Rothwell and Morley and centred on the

intersection of two motorways. The rhubarb industry owes

its location to its transport infrastructure, its adverse

climactic conditions – the triangle forms a frost pocket

under the Pennines – and the wool industry that supplies

the ‘shoddy’, a mix of various forms of wool waste. I find it

splendid that such a beautiful and rarefied plant should

rise out of such inauspicious conditions.

It would be easy to suppose that the sudden arrival of

rhubarb is just another consequence of global warming,

but the opposite is the case. The whole business of

growing rhubarb is to fool the plant into thinking spring

has arrived: the rootstock is left outside in the autumn and

needs a sharp frost to be convinced that it is winter –

hence the miserable weather enjoyed by the hardy rhubarb

farmers of the triangle. Once the frost has happened, the

plants can be taken inside to the warmer shed and then

duped into thinking it is safe to grow. Thus the earlier

and sharper the frost, the sooner the rhubarb will shoot.

We had a mild autumn, so I was puzzled by the

December rhubarb. It emerged that its producer stole a

march on his competitors by treating the plants with an

acid that encourages the conversion of carbohydrate to

sugar, which stimulates the plant to shoot. With such

trickery going on, my mind has been put to rest and I have

forgiven my greengrocer.

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