As children growing up in Austin, we did something almost every summer evening. Once the sun went down, we kids lined up along the curb in a loose huddle to deliberate over whose turn it was to get “the goods,” and whose turn it was to sneak unaware into their mother’s kitchen and snatch the salt shaker. We didn’t dare do this while the sun shone because “the goods” were owned by a woman and her aged, fossilized mother.  As far as we kids figured, this cranky old crone had only one mission in life.  Well, actually two. The first was to yell at us in her crackly voice when we ran through her backyard to play with each other, and the second was to guard—like a Roman Centurion—what was growing in that backyard.

Rhubarb!

In our way of thinking, all those big beautiful red stalks were going to waste as two elderly women could not eat them all.  Besides, we figured the Good Lord meant for them to be shared.  With us!  After all, why would He have put rhubarb on this earth if it wasn’t going to be eaten?

Kids today don’t know how deliciously, devilishly, sinfully fun it is to scavenge rhubarb  by moonlight on a sticky hot summer evening. They don’t know how juice-dripping yummy it is to dip the stalks into salt encrusted palms and crunch on its succulent sourness.  How I pity the children the loss of this experience. Once again I lay the blame on air conditioning, television (and a thousand handheld electronic devices!) that these days keep them indoors.

The very cool thing about rhubarb is that anyone can grow it.  All it takes is a wee patch of soil. And once it’s planted, it reappears (like snow) year after year after year. Most of us consider rhubarb a fruit when, indeed, it is a vegetable belonging to the Polygonaceae family. (Try spelling that backwards with a wad of bubble gum in your mouth!)  Ninety-five percent water, it has a very strong, tangy, clean, sour taste, something like a cross between fresh green apples and celery.  The leaves are high in oxalic acid and dangerous for humans.  Just the same, I do have a buck who ate all the leaves off my rhubarb plant this summer.  Didn’t touch the stalks.  He lived to tell, too, because he came back for more.  But, then, who can fathom the mystery of what appeals to deer?  Pretty much everything, I’m thinking.

I’m not smart enough to know all about rhubarb (it’s not, for Pete’s sake, as if I have a year’s paid-up subscription to Rhubarb Gazette), but my muse, Google, does. It seems, he says, that rhubarb is a plant shrouded in mystery.  The first recorded mention of it goes all the way back to China in 2700 BC where its purgative medicinal qualities were used for conditions such as constipation and inflammation.  In the 14th Century, the plant made its way to Europe.  There it inexplicably became the subject of various conspiracies and intrigues that further warped the Chinese-European relations in the same fashion as did tea.  Hundreds of years later, in the 1730s, rhubarb arrived in America. (I’m thinking that Perkins was really happy about that!)

Interestingly, in all this time, the name stayed pretty much the same.  The Greeks called it rha barbaron which means “not from around these parts.”  (How very, very perceptive of those Greeks since its origins were in far off China!)

I still don’t know why we kids always ate our raw filched rhubarb with salt and not with sugar.  Maybe it’s because our moms kept salt in tiny, easy to conceal shakers and not in five-pound bags, like sugar, which would have been inexorably more difficult to sneak out of their kitchens. It also helps explain why we kids were thinner then.

Who knew that rhubarb stalks are actually loaded with vitamins, minerals and other organic compounds that are good for us?  Dieters will delight in hearing that it has quite possibly the lowest number of calories of any vegetable, and contains vitamins B, C and K, protein dietary fiber, magnesium, manganese, potassium, calcium, beta-carotene, zeaxanthin and lutein.  Dumb deer missed the best part!

Furthermore, rhubarb is extremely low in cholesterol and fat, thus friendly to our cardiovascular systems. And, get this, its high vitamin K value helps increase bone density while delaying—or even helping to prevent—Alzheimer’s disease.  We long-in-the-tooth, silver haired folks ought to be chomping on it non-stop all day, everyday!

Baseball fans may have heard “rhubarb” spoken by sports announcers.  The term was first used sometime in the 1930s when a Brooklyn Dodgers fan had a very heated argument with a New York Giants fan.  Baseball writer, Tom Meany, described it as a  “rhubarb” although no one has ever had a clue why.  Meany had an immense listening audience which resulted in the word soon becoming part of the baseball nomenclature.

I bake my rhubarb pie with blueberries. (I do not steal this rhubarb because I own the plant. Besides, who can steal what they already own?) I like the taste and the look of this pie.  It is best eaten while sitting out on the curb with my buddies on a sticky hot August night.