The Rise of Rhubarb

"Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug," the surprising book title read. Rhubarb? Could that homely stuff of pie fillings and stewed side dishes be a high-powered medicine like aspirin and penicillin? It says so in a book review printed in the British journal Nature, definitely a publication to be taken seriously.

The review's appearance was perfectly timed. The quilted rufous leaves were just beginning to emerge above the family rhubarb patch when the journal crossed my desk. And reading it was definitely more fun then going out to weed the garden.

I don't know if rhubarb grows in Adak or Barrow, but I've seen it growing just about everywhere else in Alaska. This would probably not surprise Clifford Foust, the book's author. He points out that although culinary rhubarb comes to us via the ancient Greeks, they got it from what is now Turkey, and its kin grow in the harsh regions between Mongolia and Siberia. Rhubarb prefers damp conditions and dislikes strong sunlight.

The Greeks didn't cultivate rhubarb for desserts. They harvested its firm but spongy root, dried it, ground it into a powder, and used it as a laxative---the best in the known world. It was effective but not as harsh as other cathartics, and produced no cramps afterwards. From Greece, this useful medicine spread throughout Europe.

Its popularity continued to grow though unscrupulous quacks made snake-oil type claims for rhubarb root and its extracts. One eighteenth-century advertisement gave it the miraculous ability to cure skin ailments that included "Leprosy, Morphew, Scurg, Freckles, Spots, & etc. (Possibly it might actually be good for morphew and scurg, whatever they are.)

The rhubarb that started in Greece was easy to grow in much of northern Europe, thriving especially in Britain's overcast and cool weather. Naturally enough, the Britons suspected anything so easy to grow couldn't be the best kind. Showing an attitude many Alaskans may recognize, they believed imported goods were superior. English merchants traded with Russia for exotic rhubarb from the Far East. Peter the Great set up a state monopoly in rhubarb, controlling all trade in the plant, while the Chinese prohibited export of rhubarb seeds.

By 1781, Catherine the Great decided to revoke the Russian controls, proclaiming free trade in rhubarb on the grounds that it would be much more efficient than the state monopoly. (One wonders if perhaps a very young Mikhail Gorbachev was told this story while being encouraged to eat his stewed rhubarb...) Caravans carried thousands of pounds of the valuable root across the heart of Asia.

History tells us that spice caravans sometimes ended at the doors of charlatans and crooks, from which wooden nutmegs later emerged. Apparently the less romantic laxative trade occasionally fell afoul of similar profiteers. One common seam was to adulterate the ground root with sawdust. Another was to pass off locally grown roots as the expensive imported kind. Foust cites the case of one dealer who justified such behavior on the grounds of patriotism---passing off the native plant as the foreign was much better for the national economy, since all the money stayed at home.

Rhubarb's culinary uses always were separate from its medicinal ones. It was much less popular as food than as medicine up until the end of the eighteenth century. Then, possibly as an unplanned result of British farmers' attempts to breed rhubarb with a more potent root, varieties with less bitter leaf stalks appeared.

Rhubarb made the leap from vegetable to dessert at about the same time, as sugar became widely and inexpensively available. The review speculates that Victorian housewives favored rhubarb because its sharp taste suited their punitive "eat it, it's good for you" standards. Perhaps the plant's long association with medicine also helped the conscientiously virtuous ladies offer this sweet to their families.

Rhubarb is now off the apothecaries' shelves and into the pastry cooks' repertoires, and we'll surely never again see laxative caravans trudging across the steppes. Somehow, though, it's nice to know this commonplace plant had such a romantic past.