And they’re off!

Welcome to our new readers!

Here are the first bean overachievers, a mere six days after planting. Thus begins four months of all beans, all the time. But before that, enjoy an essay on an oft-overlooked garden offering, with thanks to my exceptional writing group for their feedback.

Rhubarb

The screaming shop-vac in my kitchen means one of two things: someone’s dropped a wine glass or I’m making pie.

At ten o’clock in the morning, I can assure you it’s not the former.

Early summer is high rhubarb season and one of two times a year I bake pie. Conditions are critical. The baker requires unhurried time, a good night’s sleep and the house to herself.

For most of my life I have been rhubarb-averse. The sourness was off-putting, needing too much sugar to coax out its latent sweetness. My grandfather guaranteed my distaste for the stuff one long-ago June day when he pulled a strawberry-hued stalk from Grandma’s garden and handed it to me. “Try this.”

Even a ten-year-old could see through that. Nothing delighted him more than baiting the grandkids. I stared at him, my chin stubbornly stuck out.

“Oh, go on,” he cackled. “You’ll like it.” The longer I resisted, the more he pressured. “I promise.”

I bit.

My eyes squinched shut so hard I saw lights and Grandpa laughed until he wheezed.

I cared nothing more for the stuff until a patch of it began to thrive next to my driveway. At that point it stopped being a tool to torture little kids and became a crop. Free food. Even better—-pie.

Around here, for better or for worse, pie is scratch made, including the crust. However, this is one of a number of skills that seems to have skipped a generation. My mother executed and perfected pie crusts in absence of formal instruction, and I, on the other hand, can never manage better than low mediocre no matter how many times someone shows me how. I attempt her deft lightness with a rolling pin, hoping that some of her kitchen intuition will by rights transmute to her daughter.

It never does.

Mom also followed recipes as they were written, knowing well enough not to push her luck. That skill her daughter possesses in spades.

The effort might have been doomed from the start when I substituted whole wheat for half of the usual white flour. It unbalanced the dry-to-liquid ratio, but it seemed easy to adjust as I went.

Let’s just say that in defiance of every pie recipe ever written, I rolled and re-rolled the dough until it hung together. By the time I’d confined the crust to its plate and weighed it in place with rhubarb filling, it was hard to tell who’d won. The kitchen required cleanup with not a broom, but the aforementioned shop-vac. One jeans leg was dusted white from the knee down. Enough flour coated the floor to resembled sawdust at a barn dance. To the delight of the dog, my bare feet had tracked dough bits as far as the living room. And I discovered, too late, that it was the wrong day to wear a black shirt in the kitchen.

None of this would be worth the aggravation except that scratch baking seems to feed the hunger for belonging to a food culture. When I was a kid in the 60’s, any recipes from our family’s countries of origin had been abandoned in favor of meals from boxes and cans. Mom and her mother welcomed the upgrade to convenience from handmade hardship. But traditions were lost. Our entire food heritage seems to have been left behind on the ships that brought ancestors from Ireland.

In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver maintains that “At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them.” This makes rhubarb part of my food culture. It grew in every garden of my childhood and now it grows in mine.

I am kin to rhubarb, beans, and anyone willing to share a warm slice of rhubarb pie.