Relishing Rhubarb
Monday, April 26, 2010 at 10:27AM 
Learning to Love It
I love rhubarb now, but I haven’t always. When I was a child, rhubarb was the one fruit we had more of than we needed, so my mother was always finding ways to “use it up,” a phrase one should not use around children when referring to food you want them to like. Yes, there’s something about having an abundance of something that makes it seem ordinary and boring, or maybe even yucky.
But then I married a man who loved anything rhubarb. He grew up in a home without a mother grew things or baked things—or used things up, for that matter—so rhubarb treats were a rare thing. Instead of birthday cake, he’d request a rhubarb pie with half the called-for sugar. He was someone who relished his rhubarb.
For the first years of our marriage, we had no supply of fresh rhubarb, which meant that birthday pie was the only rhubarb we ate, and even that took some careful planning to accomplish. Struggling to have something can turn the ordinary into something cherished, and before long, I was anticipating the birthday pie as much as he was. I was starting to relish my rhubarb, too.
While it was it’s scarcity that made me love it more, I think rhubarb is also an acquired taste. Nothing else is quite like it, and it’s very tart. A Korean student I knew learned to stomach almost every North American food except rhubarb; even the sound of the word caused her face to crinkle up. Rhubarb was an acquired taste she had no intention acquiring. (I could sympathize: It turns out I felt the same way about her Korean fish soup.)
