Listen to English Rhubarb Lyrics

Rhubarb
Friday 01 February 2008

In this podcast, we are going to meet some words about food - some very English sorts of food. Look out for these words - rhubarb, pie, crumble, chutney, custard.
A lot of people who visit England think that English food is very strange. A lot of English people think this too. My children, for example, seem to eat nothing but pizza and pasta. And the most popular restaurants in England are often Italian or Indian or Thai - they are generally not English.
However, some traditional English food is very good. We keep it secret, however, because we don't want the whole world to find out. One of our secrets is rhubarb. You can see a picture of a rhubarb plant on the website, and on your iPod screens. It has red stems and big leaves. The stems are the bit which we eat; the leaves are actually poisonous. Because the stems are very bitter, we chop then into pieces and cook the pieces very slowly with lots of sugar. We then use the cooked rhubarb to make pies, or crumbles, or we eat the rhubarb with custard. We also make rhubarb jam, and rhubarb chutney. There are lots of rhubarb recipes on the BBC website. Try some of them if you want to experience some uniquely English cooking.

I need to warn you, however, that the taste of rhubarb is something which you either love or hate. And rhubarb is said to be a laxative - that means, it makes you want to go to the toilet, so be careful how much rhubarb you eat!
In the 19th century, a gardener left an old chimney-pot on top of one of his rhubarb plants. The rhubarb grew up through the chimney pot, looking for the light. The stems were pale pink in colour, instead of bright red. And the rhubarb which had grown in the dark had a beautiful delicate taste. This method of growing rhubarb in the dark is called "forcing", and we can talk about "forced rhubarb". We can buy forced rhubarb in January and February, when there are not many home-grown fruit or vegetables in the shops. Most of the forced rhubarb comes from Yorkshire in the north of England. The rhubarb grows in big sheds, in the dark. The growers pick the rhubarb by hand, using candles instead of electric lights because the sheds must be kept as dark as possible. People say that if you stand in a rhubarb shed, and listen carefully, you can hear the rhubarb growing.

At one time, there were over 200 rhubarb growers in Yorkshire. Special trains used to take the picked rhubarb to London and other big cities. But today there are only about 12 traditional rhubarb growers left. Why? Public taste has changed, and rhubarb has a very old-fashioned image. People remember the wonderful rhubarb crumble that their grandmothers used to make. But they prefer to buy imported strawberries or other fruit instead. This is very sad. So I have made this podcast hoping that it will help to revive interest in rhubarb. Next time you are in England, eat some rhubarb, if you dare!