A Short Season

and a delicious strawberry-rhubarb crisp

One of the things I love most about cooking is that you are never done learning.

I have just returned home from three weeks in Northern Ontario, our annual trip to the family cabin. About 45 minutes from the nearest full-size grocery store, we shop and cook almost entirely from the farmers markets in the surrounding towns. My June cookbook read, The Lost Kitchen, was filled with ingredients unique to Maine (moose, edible wildflowers, rhubarb) and it turned out to be the perfect primer for cooking in Canada.

The market boasted flats of sweet strawberries, teeny wild blueberries, fresh-dug, still-dirty new potatoes, green garlic and garlic scapes, crisp purple asparagus, and large, shiny stalks of rhubarb. I confessed that I had never cooked with rhubarb before—which my New England-bred husband couldn’t believe—so I set out to learn how to work with this giant stalk of what looked to me like celery dipped in pink paint.

Mike shared with me how, as a child, he and his sister would pull the tall stalks from his grandmother’s garden and dip the ends directly into a coffee can filled with sugar. If you’ve never eaten rhubarb, I suggest this is how you try it first. The stalks are fibrous but not stringy, juicy and delightfully tart. Dipped in sugar, it’s like nature’s Sour Patch Kid.

Unlike Mike I did not grow up eating, or even seeing, rhubarb. It thrives in places with long, cold winters and mild summers, neither of which we have in the South. But I read enough recipes to know it is often pickled, turned into jam, or paired with berries in desserts.

At the cottage we have dessert every night, so I paired it with those perfect local strawberries and baked a crisp big enough to feed all nineteen family members. It was devoured by all, aged 4 to 74.

A few days later I returned to the market to buy more rhubarb for another round of testing, only to find it had sold out minutes before I arrived. A week later, the growers told me the season was already over. It was a good reminder that some ingredients really are fleeting—you either catch them or you wait another year.

rhubarb vs. apple test

Luckily I found rhubarb one more time at another market, enough to finish testing. But I knew I couldn’t publish a recipe built around an ingredient that so many of you might never find. So I tested it again with juicy and tart Granny Smith apples replacing the rhubarb to much success.

If your summer travels bring you to a market with fresh rhubarb, I hope you’ll make this recipe as written. And if not, I hope you’ll buy an unfamiliar ingredient and and learn how to cook with it. Some ingredients only come around once a year.

If you’re feeding a crowd (like I was), double the recipe and bake in a 9x13 casserole

the recipe: Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp

Serves 8-10