Rhubarb Spaghetti Sauce. Rhubarb Spaghetti Sauce???

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It is high rhubarb season among us, huge green leaves unfolding at the end of long pink stalks, and statuesque buds emerging and blooming into elegant ivory blossoms. People who like rhubarb, and not everyone does, are trying to figure out what to do with it since it is so abundant. The good news is, it’s not just stewed rhubarb any more, or pie, which I all I remember from my childhood.  It seems that modern culinary experimentation has yielded up chutneys, compotes, crisps, marmalade, shortcake, cakes and coffee cakes of every stripe, muffins, bars, you name it.

Last week, on behalf of Stephen Bergey of Belfast, we went looking for a gingerbread-like breakfast cake with rhubarb that Stephen remembered. He was pretty sure that the recipe was one of Brownie Schrumpf’s and that rhubarb was the moist element in it. “It’s a great un-sweet cake,” he wrote, “and I would like to find it again.” We had some welcome replies, but none exactly matching Stephen’s recollection. We’ll keep trying to find it. Meanwhile, what about rhubarb in a main dish?

That is what motivated Kal Weiner of Appleton to experiment with rhubarb: a way to extend its usefulness beyond dessert in its season. Back-to-the landers, Kal and his wife, Linda Tatelbaum, (author of Carrying Water as a Way of Life), have grown most of their own food for decades and customarily eat whatever is in season. Wearying of winter stored root crops, squash, and cabbage, he wanted another use for abundant spring rhubarb.

It is, no doubt, counter-intuitive to use rhubarb with tomato sauce and baked beans on pasta. In fact, Kal himself wrote, “It is surprisingly good,” so I made half the recipe Kal sent because I thought, if I don’t like this, I sure don’t want a lot of it around.

It is tasty. The odor of the sauce drifted under Toby’s nose, and when he asked what I was making and I told him, he said, “It doesn’t smell like rhubarb.” Then I handed him a small dish with a sample; he looked dubious, but took a taste and said, “It’s good!”

Kal turned the leftovers of a recent batch into pizza sauce, topped with garlic roasted butternut squash and sautéed onions.

The baked beans are an optional add-in but I had some in the freezer and I think it makes a really solid addition. I also added the more traditional spaghetti sauce seasonings of oregano and basil. Altogether, the sauce is substantial enough that meat is not necessary, but you may prefer to add some ground meat or sausage.

So you may be asking yourself, why bother at all to add rhubarb to spaghetti sauce? I think the answer, besides using more of a seasonal food, is about nutrition, if you care about such things: a hefty dose of Vitamin C, potassium, and good old fiber.

Also, remember to cut back all the blossoms—bring them inside for a bouquet—because that promotes fresh rhubarb longer. Once the plant blooms, it figures it is done and begins to die back.

Kal’s Rhubarb Spaghetti Sauce
Serves: Six
 
Ingredients
  • Vegetable oil
  • 4 medium onions, cut lengthwise in wedges
  • 2 quarts of rhubarb, about ten stalks, cut into ¾ inch pieces
  • ¼ cup red wine
  • 1 quart (or a 28 ounce can) plum tomatoes, or sliced fresh tomatoes
  • ⅝ cup of maple syrup (or less to taste)
  • 3 cups baked beans (optional)
  • Oregano to taste
  • Basil to taste
Instructions
  1. Cover the bottom of a heavy cook pot with vegetable oil and put over medium heat.
  2. Sauté the onions in the oil until softened.
  3. Add the rhubarb and red wine and cook, stirring often, until the rhubarb softens.
  4. Add the tomatoes and cook for five to ten minutes.
  5. Taste, and add maple syrup to temper the rhubarb’s sourness, but not enough to make it too sweet. Add the baked beans, and cook until the rhubarb chunks have disappeared and the sauce is relatively smooth and thickened.
  6. Add the oregano and basil if desired.
  7. Serve on favorite pasta.

 

Sandy Oliver

About Sandy Oliver

Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.