Rhubarb, rhubarb

Between New Year and Spring, there are few things to look forward to. The weather tends to be grey and forbidding, a mix of frost, rain and snow. Mornings and evenings are dark, damp and depressingly chilling, and more often than not the car requires scraping both before you set out to work and before you leave the office. So nothing warms my heart more than the arrival of that most humble of vegetables masquerading as fruit - rhubarb. Forced rhubarb, to be precise, as though it were made to against its will.





If I am honest, I love rhubarb in all its guises - either pornographically young, pink and nubile, or the later sturdy green petioles. But the blushed fleshiness of the forced rhubarb stalk seems particularly appropriate for February - a nod from nature at that fictitious celebration of love and romance, Valentines day. Combined with a gravelly crumble topping, gritty with demerara, it is an epicurean snub to the inhospitably biting cold of a February evening.

Yesterday, whilst recovering from my recent op, I had the good fortune to spend an entire day watching UK TV Food, where they discussed the virtues of the humble crumble and how it should be done. The consensus appeared to be that each person has their own preference, and the section was finished off by the wonderful Matthew Fort demonstrating his version of rhubarb crumble.
It brought me close to tears.
Not for good reasons either.

There seems to be, amongst certain people in the foodie world, a need to create tastes never before discovered, and in an effort to do so, flavours are combined endlessly in the vague hope that the sum of the whole will be greater than their parts, and a new, synergistic flavour is discovered. In practice, I fear, this rarely happens. The end result is often a cacophony of badly balanced tastes that only serve to mask the subtleties of each part.


Mr Fort, whom I admire greatly and once had the privilege of having dinner along side (to say with would be a stretch - we were in the same oxfordshire gastropub though not together, but that's never how I tell it), decided to add a handful of shards of root ginger and the grated zest of an orange and its juice to a dish of forced rhubarb, along with a crumble topping which contained a squirrel-pleasingly large amount of roasted hazelnuts.
Why?

Root ginger is poky in the extreme, and orange zest has a habit of making everything an approximation of orange - I can only imagine this would have utterly drowned out any of the delicious rhubarby notes. I felt indignant. Possibly one of those flavourings as a subtle note along side the rhubarb could have worked, but I still feel that this is adulteration of the first order. I suspect people who feel the need to add such copious quantities of 'flavourings' actually don't really like the taste of the main player in the dish. To my mind, sullying this delicate winter treat is akin to a 10 year old slapping on make-up and a basque. Its wrong on so many levels.

The only possible exception to this is the addition of vanilla. Rhubarb and vanilla have a true, unquestionable affinity, immortalised in the gorgeous rhubarb and custard boiled sweet of childhood, and as such, is the only acceptable supporting actor to the rosy star of the show. Either scrape out the seeds and add to the crumble mix, or use vanilla sugar, which I believe is the correct method, the bourbon sweetness a duvet of scent and warmth against the sharply puckering, softly yielding pink flesh of the poached rhubarb. Never stew it - it loses its integrity and becomes a stringy mush.

Below is my recipe for a classically beautiful rhubarb crumble. It warms the heart, excites the tongue and dazzles the palate.

800 grams rhubarb (or two packs of Waitrose rhubarb)
8 tbsp vanilla sugar
a sprinkling of water
4 oz butter
4 oz demerara sugar
7 oz flour

Preheat oven to 180 degrees centigrade or 350 Fahrenheit
Butter a deep ovenproof dish

1. Chop the washed rhubarb into 1 inch pieces and place in a dish with a sprinkling of water and the vanilla sugar.


2. Place in the oven to start cooking for about ten minutes or so.


3. Whilst the rhubarb is cooking, make your crumble mix by rubbing together, or sticking in the magimix, the butter, all but 2 tablespoons of the demerara sugar and the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs.


4. Remove the part cooked rhubarb from the oven and sprinkle over all but a handful of the crumble mix and gently pat down.


5. With the leftover handful, squish it together in your hands so as it forms small lumps, and scatter this over the sandy crumble, and finally scatter over the remainder of the demerara sugar.


6. Bake for a further 20-30 minutes, or until golden brown, with the juices bubbling up in a fruity, toffee mass at the edges.
7. Serve with custard, ice cream, cream or, if you are me, all three.