My yearly rhubarb post is late, but it’s been stewing. There were rhematic and rheumatic unintended consequences to something I wrote recently, ones I hadn’t even considered. Rhubarb: rheum rhabarbarum—rue, barb.
Okay, this part is intentional.
With pure intentions--er, ingredients--like this, how can we go wrong?Take a risk with your heart and it sours, and you can take your lumps and an antacid and move on. Take a risk with your heart in print, and the world tweets, I mean "risks" with you on Twitter.
Know that for every post you see plated here, there are 5 more on burners and ancillary heating elements, hanging out of cupboards or curing on hooks in inconvenient eyesight in my home and range of swinging into a forehead: on scraps of paper, in the margins of books “lightly in pencil,” on ubiquitous post-its. I don’t have much occasion to write on soft, damp cocktail napkins anymore (oh, how I loved their rank, nutritionally void dampness for a time!), but I have written on a diaper and on my own skin, on shopping lists even now crowding out staples, and on the generally sturdy fabrics and upholsteries of my late 30’s. Also, on writing in blood: I have never written with it, but have recently composed with its sweeter, anime form, beet juice.
There are concepts I know intellectually: things turn out pretty much as we already know; an untempered egg will scramble a custard; no one ever died from a broken heart; sorry doesn’t fix everything. These we dutifully swallow to call ourselves grown-up--doesn’t mean they ever go down easy.
I "know" that for every person who reads and takes home a doggie bag of meat here, there are five who pick at their plates and/or never really dig in, several more that won’t digest properly because of their own strictures and GI temperament, and at least one, who, like my favorite joke on this earth, will eschew it altogether like a cannibal avoiding a clown, because it tastes funny to them.
No one can explain taste.
I would know the numbers if I kept the statistics anymore, but for the obsessive-compulsive at heart and stomach, a blog can become one’s cud without certain stops in place. I can only tell you that you are probably in the company of 11 confirmed subscribers.
I confess (“I confess!”--absolute absurdity on a blog) I almost always mean one or more things at once, I’m a complicated magical pudding in the middle kind of girl who purports herself as simple and harmless and you know what?-- ALL of those things are true. We often think things are mutually exclusive when they—sweet irony alert!—just AREN'T.
Guilt free: no consolatory morning-after recipe needed for pure intentions.
I suppose the worst you could say is that I’m a somewhat disobedient but ultimately sensible minx who occasionally (just occasionally now), means what I said the very first time and just that.The thing about mistaken intentions is this, and then I’ll leave it: “Thank God it’s fatal, not shy.” Andrew Bird, whose whistling skills I greatly admire, said this. We think everyone can or should be able to cook and whistle, only it isn’t true (I can’t whistle, by the way).
Another way, have you ever been watching someone on stage, and realized as an after-beat that--waitaminute--they were unaltered but by passion and no other substance than ordinary blood and bile? How the eff are they doing it then, you asked, almost UNWILLING to believe they could say or do it--that they would choose to, without filters?
Madame Rhubarb is like that: like a former drunk who’s spent a long time learning something about restraint, to use her voice, her tone, her faculties FOR and not against herself—a stone cold sober girl who does it anyway—chooses to do it & with wild abandon, who doesn't feel like apologizing because there is no need.
And we are deeply uncomfortable about that. It makes us Heretics (read the words, I love all them all and they deserve space).
But why is it so uncomfortable??? Because it feels…disobedient, to witness passion without apology and because I think there is something like a perceptible smugness to being okay with the process over the product which causes sincere discomfort .
People sometimes confuse what I do here. SIGH. I will let you in on a Little Secret: while we avoid it everywhere we can, we must now assume that our concepts of "harmless" sometimes differ. Maybe “First do no harm” was good enough to be innaccurately ascribed to Hippocrates and for the field of medicine, but for Bacchus and Minerva & the realm of the tongue and the pen, that doesn’t begin to cut the rhubarb mustard.
Where craft is concerned, I think our creed must be this: “First, do what you need to that is good"—then I’m certainly not opposed to the corollary, “do no harm.” It has to be.
Writing serves no higher or lower purpose than to be heretical, hopeful, romantic, disobedient.
"What was going to happen? This question, as I’ve said, seems to be at the root of most romantic encounters, and at the root of disobedience, too."
-Jane Hamilton, from Disobedience
I can’t begin to navigate the rhubarbed wire wrapped around a single human heart tonight—it's not my job, but dammit, I can cook. Let’s make ice cream, and share a spoon.
Disobedient Frozen Rhubarb-Ginger Custard Recipe:
[For my Dad, who gets and loves rhubarb, exactly for what it is and without expecting something else]
This is in stages, motivated by freshness of the ingredients (who’s going bad and how fast). None of them are hard in and of themselves. It’s all very simple once you get to the point of throwing the switch on the ice-cream maker. Of course, it’s always simple after the hard part is done.
I am pleased to say I have no idea how it will all turn out; I am sitting here listening to the machine turn. Your guess is as good as mine.
Three Ingredients: Rhubarb-ginger puree, Brown sugar scalded custard, whipping cream.
RHUBARB GINGER PUREE:
De-leaf & chop 4 stalks of rhubarb and put into a saucepan with ¾ C sugar, a peeled and chopped piece of ginger root (about the size of the fat part of your palm, right under the thumb), and a little pomegranate or blueberry juice. Simmer, cook down, squeeze the juice of one lemon, seeds and all (you're going to puree it anyway), over the mix and keep adding juice or water until it’s a syrupy consistency. The rhubarb will string out, become soft and fall apart.
Cool and puree.
BROWN SUGAR CUSTARD:
Sounds hard and good, but this is all it is: scald 2 cups of whole milk and 2 cups of half and half in a pot. I like copper because it feels magic to me, but it’s entirely unnecessary.
Whisk in ¾ C of dark brown sugar, and bring the heat down.
Separate 6 egg yolks, temper them with a cup or two of the scalded milk mixture, then return to the pot and keep simmering gently and whisking until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Chill.
Put the custard into an ice-cream maker or a stand-mixer fitted with the well-frozen ice-cream bowl & attachment. Add 2 cups super-cold whipping cream, while running. Dribble in the rhubarb puree. Run for 30 minutes or until it thickens up. Taste, swoon, freeze.
It's all about consistency: still not thick enough to be misunderstood. Back in the machine.A final note on this recipe:
You know, I have tried to resist Facebook, but really, so far it’s brought only good & in the past year reconnected me with what may be the only uncomplicated male relationship of my life. Equal parts destiny and that esteemed "harmlessness" you can hardly always make the claim for, it could simply be that any two people who meet while working in a library, not-yet of legal drinking age, are doomed or exhonerated.
He comes to me now in 40-year-old commentary, both real and imagined, having resumed pointing out the red lipstick on my teeth (a thing both impressive and scary to have taken on as a teenage boy), but also taste the words that come out of me, the hypocrisies and the gifts.
“Be carefullllll” I heard him whisper-smile over the steaming custard as I stirred, “this is exactly the kind of dish bright, lonely girls make.”
He’s right, I'm sure. Hot girls like beets. Girls with inconsolable grudges make rhubarb puddings.
Maybe not...or maybe also, the Sensible Minx eats what and whomever she wants, no matter who’s reading.
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