I’m in my early 40’s. When I was a child, it was semi-common to find restaurants that served rhubarb pie. It was never very common, but if you went looking for it, you usually didn’t have to look too long before finding a restaurant that carried it.
Not anymore. For the last 15 years or so, nobody carries it–no restaurant, no grocery store. The only thing that I can find–and even this is pretty rare–is strawberry-rhubarb pie. I don’t want idiotic strawberry-rhubarb pie; I want rhubarb pie.
I love strawberry rhubarb pie! I don’t think I had ever seen a rhubarb until I was a young adult. But I spent a lot of time in Texas and I don’t think rhubarb was all that popular there.
When I was a kid, we raised all kinds of fruits and veggies in our back yard, including a patch or rhubarb. And behind our property was a large field with lots of blackberries. My mom baked plain rhubarb pie, and also blackberry-rhubarb pie. Mmmmm!
My mother-in-law feels so strongly about the importance of rhubarb pie that when she moved, she insisted as part of the sale of the house that she be allowed to come back and dig up the rhubarb she had planted at the correct time of the year to transplant it safely. The rhubarb did not convey. The lawyer thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. Fortunately, she had sold her house to a friend, and he was okay with her returning for the rhubarb.
Apparently rhubarb comes from Mongolia, as my mom discovered when she visited there and saw it growing wild. And so, of course, she immediately harvested some, and made jam. While she was on vacation, on the opposite side of the world from her kitchen, while staying in a yurt. The other tourists and the locals alike were amazed when she served everyone the jam with breakfast the next morning.
My mom was a great pie maker and I loved her rhubarb most of all - I am a sucker for tart/sweet. Rhubarb was easy to get in stores in the northeast and my grandparents had some growing in the yard so it was a regular treat. We’d eat it stewed, too - essentially just the filling of a pie. No need to add strawberries, IMHO.
I recently started trying to make pies (nowhere near as easily as mom made it look) but rhubarb is really hard to find here in SoCal - the few scared stalks I found in Gelsons were $12/lb. I’ve also found pre-made pies at Marie Callender’s but I’m sure it is canned filling, ok in a pinch.
One of the nicest gifts my wife has ever given me was finding a friend who had access to a bunch of rhubarb and making me a cobbler for my birthday dinner.
Once I had a gooseberry pie and my memory is that it was just about as good.
I grow rhubarb on my place and there is never a shortage of people who come a’begging for it every year. I don’t need much for myself, so I’m happy to give it away. And I’ve made a ton of rhubarb pies for others over the years – gives me an excuse to have a slice, too.
@mtnmatt, I have a recipe for stewed rhubarb that’s not super sweet to pair over roasted poultry. It’s a pretty wonderful combination!
I have never had rhubarb pie. I sometimes make strawberry rhubarb, but rarely eat it myself. I like sour flavors, but there’s something about the texture of rhubarb that I’m not wild about.
My mom only baked with what she grew (zucchini bread: not as bad as it sounds). Rhubarb gets woodier as summer progresses, so it was canned early and saved for later as a ice cream topping. Not as many pies rolled out since cobblers are easier (this was the Midwest, where bars prevail over cookies for the same reason. I guess pies and cookies were for Southerners who could hire cheap labor while they lazed in the heat (ahem).
The birds never gave the strawberries much chance, but since Germans have enlarged sour receptors, my mom wouldn’t have mixed them in anyway. We did have tart cherries, but never added them in either.
For NSFW yuks, look up “rhubarb thief” on YouTube.
My Dad was a baker, and when I was growing up he had a small rhubarb patch in the back yard. Not for the family; he was growing it for the bakery where he worked. I’m not sure if it was because they preferred to use fresh rhubarb or if it was hard to get commercially in the quantities they needed.
I grew up in Texas, and rhubarb really wasn’t a thing there. I’d never even had rhubarb until just recently.
The previous owners of our current house apparently intended to plant rhubarb in the yard, but never got around to it- they just left them, unpotted, sitting in the ground in the side of our house… which is evidently the optimal growing environment for rhubarb, as we now have dinosaur sized plants growing there.
We harvested some and made a strawberry-rhubarb cobbler and some rhubarb-infused vodka, and both were fantastic.