When I was a kid, rhubarb dishes appeared on our family menu each May, confirming unequivocally that spring had finally arrived. Seeing a basket of bright red rhubarb at the local market enticed me to try this Rhubarb Tart with Crème Anglaise recipe that I’ve saved just for this occasion.
Rhubarb is a perennial plant that grows best in cold, northern climates worldwide. Once planted, it renews yearly and spreads widely. Rhubarb is one of the first edible plants to poke out of the earth in the spring and is a welcome dietary addition after a long winter.
Known in Ukraine by several names rabarbar, rumbambar, barbary, reveen (рабарбар, румбамбар,барбари, ревінь), meaning “stranger from the shores of the Volga”, rhubarb has grown in Ukraine for over 350 years. According to culinary historians, rhubarb was grown in China as early as 2700 B.C.E., where it was used medicinally. Once the trading path between East and West along the Silk Road was established during the 13th and 14th centuries C.E., rhubarb became a sought-after commodity. Traders smuggled rhubarb roots, as export from China then was forbidden, from the East to West, where it was prized as botanical curiosity cultivated for its striking appearance and medicinal properties.
In the 16th century, rhubarb appeared in Russia, where it was called Siberian reveen (сибірський ревінь). Russia established a valuable monopoly over rhubarb trade in Europe, the breaking of which was punishable by death. Emma Kay, a British food historian, writes that a Scottish doctor who treated Peter the Great smuggled several pounds of roots into Britain from Russia after the death of his patient and feared Russian punishment for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, the roots of this rhubarb strain spread throughout Europe and were used as a pharmaceutical for gastrointestinal ailments.
Some rhubarb roots probably arrived in Ukraine from Russia and were used medicinally; other rhubarb roots came to western Ukraine from Austro-Hungary in the 19th century. When rhubarb arrived in Ukraine, however, it gained popularity as a culinary ingredient in the 19th century. The inherent tartness of rhubarb required copious amounts of honey to make it palatable, but even though honey is sweeter than sugar, and less is needed to achieve the same degree of sweetness, production of honey is limited by nature and other sweeteners were unavailable at the time.
After Napoleon’s troops brought French sugar beet technology to Volyn in western Ukraine in 1812 and sugar factories were built, beet sugar became a plentiful alternative to honey and rhubarb’s culinary use increased. Ukrainian cooks transformed sour rhubarb into sweet preserves, puddings, compotes, sweet soups, refreshing drinks and wine, savory sauce accompaniments to meat and fish, and a welcome addition of tartness in red and green borshch. Mostly, these were no-recipe, improvised dishes passed by word of mouth, as in my family. Even in baked goods, adding rhubarb was an improvisation, a substitute for unavailable fruit.
Rhubarb grows throughout Ukraine but has not been used extensively over the last few decades. Several factors probably contributed to rhubarb’s culinary decline. In the waning decades of the USSR, sugar beet production in Ukraine fell through government mismanagement of factories, sugar plants fell into disrepair, and beet sugar became too expensive to use in the quantity needed to sweeten rhubarb. Rhubarb production, therefore, fell and several generations of cooks had no experience in cooking or baking with it. When I started to work in Kyiv in the 1990s, I asked friends where to buy rabarbar, the name for rhubarb used in my family, and none of my Kyiv colleagues heard of it. When I called rhubarb reveen (ревінь), the same name used in Russian, several cooks recalled hearing about it but never seeing it at markets or cooking with it. Fortunately, rhubarb survived as a culinary ingredient in communities with ample honey production.
Ukrainian anthropologist and food writer Marianna Dushar, also known as blogger Pani Stefa*, notes that rhubarb is experiencing a resurgence. For decades, it was undeservedly a forgotten ingredient. Before the Russian invasion in 2022, rhubarb plantations were growing in western and central regions of Ukraine.
Pani Stefa reports that now two rhubarb dishes symbolize spring – compote and slab pie (plyatsok). Rhubarb compote is a refreshing drink made by simmering chopped rhubarb stalks, often with a cook’s choice of other fruits, honey and spices. Sometimes, it is eaten as cooked; sometimes, it is pureed or strained; sometimes, it is transformed into a cooling soup with a dollop of cream. The second dish, rhubarb slab pie, provides an infinite platform for improvisation: it can be made from any dough in combination with strawberries, raisins, apples or pears, spiced with cinnamon, cloves, vanilla sugar, with any additions.
My family’s recipes for rhubarb slab pies and tarts originated in Volyn where many households grew rhubarb and kept beehives. So, in addition to preserves and drinks, rhubarb was incorporated into rustic, mostly simple short-crust pastry. Occasionally, rhubarb was used as a filling in yeast-leavened buns (pyrizhki) or sweet bread, or in a baking powder–leavened coffee cake.
The idea for this Rhubarb Tart with Crème Anglaise comes from www.matpro.no, a Norwegian recipe website. It closely resembles the improvised rhubarb tarts Mama and my aunt Hanna baked. Rhubarb, without adding other fruit, with just sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla, is the star of this pastry. Sour cream, a typical Ukrainian addition, enhances the cardamom-flavored Scandinavian dough for a tender, tangy crust.
Mama usually served rhubarb tarts as baked or with a light dusting of powdered sugar. This Rhubarb Tart is delicious plain. For special occasions, I’ve served a rhubarb tart à la mode with a rich vanilla ice cream. But this Rhubarb Tart with a few tablespoons of vanilla-sed speckled crème anglaise captures spring’s essence- a sublime dessert, a fitting end to a springtime dinner.
Rhubarb tart with custard sauce
For tart dough
5 ¼ ounces (150 g) butter
12 ⅓ ounces (350 g) all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons (50 g) sugar
3 egg yolks
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
1 tablespoon sour cream
2 tablespoons ice-cold water
Pinch fine sea salt
For topping:
1 egg
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon coarse sugar
For filling:
2 pounds 2 ounces (1 kg) rhubarb
10 ounces (255.6 g) sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon vanilla paste or extract
¼ cup (44 g) ClearJel Cook Type** or potato starch
1 tablespoon butter, cut into small pieces
For custard sauce:
1 vanilla bean or 2 teaspoons vanilla paste
7 ounces whole milk
6 ounces heavy cream
6 egg yolks
½ cup (120 g) sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
Preparing the dough: Combine butter, flour and sugar in the bowl of a food processor and pulse 5 times until mixture becomes sandy. Add 1 egg yolk at a time, pulsing a few times after each addition. Then add sour cream and water, a spoon at a time each, pulsing two times after each addition, and then pulse just until a ball of dough forms on the food processor blade. Remove and shape into a ball, wrap in plastic, flatten into a disk, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Preparing filling: Cut rhubarb into 1-inch (3 cm) long pieces and place in a large bowl. In a small bowl, whisk sugar with ClearJel or potato flour. Sprinkle sugar mixture, zest and vanilla over the rhubarb and mix to combine.
Rhubarb with sugar and ClearJel
Assembling and baking tart: Roll out ⅔ of the dough into a ¼ inch (0,6 cm) thick round to fit a 10-11 inch (25-28 cm) loose-bottomed tart pan. Transfer and fit dough without stretching into the tart pan, trimming dough to within ½ inch (1.27 cm) of tart pan edge. Dock pastry with a fork. Chill tart crust for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, roll out the remaining tart dough and cut 14-inch (35.5 cm) long and ½-inch (1.27 cm) wide strips with a pastry cutter. Weave the strips into a lattice on parchment paper and chill the lattice.
Transfer the rhubarb-sugar mixture and any accumulated juices into the tart pan. Dot filling with bits of butter.
Filled tart dotted with butter
Slide the lattice from parchment paper to the top of the tart, overlapping tart dough over the lattice ends. Crimp tart edge. Brush lattice, tart edge with beaten egg, and sprinkle with coarse sugar.
Tart ready for the oven
Place tart pan on rimmed baking sheet to catch any overflow and bake tart at 400ºF(200°C) for approximately 40-60 minutes, covering with foil if browning too much, until juices bubble and crust is golden. Remove from oven and cool to room temperature.
Just baked!
Preparing custard sauce: While tart is baking, combine cream, milk, ¼ cup sugar, vanilla pod, or vanilla paste in a medium heavy-bottomed saucepan and simmer over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture starts to bubble around the pan’s edge, about 2 minutes. Do not let mixture boil, lift pot off the heat if boiling starts. Remove from the heat and let stand for 20 minutes.
While the milk mixture is infusing, whisk egg yolks with remaining ¼ cup sugar in a medium bowl. Quickly whisk in ¼ cup hot cream mixture into the egg yolk mixture, whisking in more ladles, one at a time, to the eggs until the egg mixture is warm. (This will temper the eggs and prevent curdling.) Pour the tempered milk and egg mixture into the remaining cream in the saucepan and return the pan to the heat. Stirring constantly, continue cooking mixture over medium heat until the custard coats the back of a spoon for about 5 to 7 minutes.
Once the custard has thickened, remove it from the heat and strain it through a sieve into a medium bowl to remove lumps and the vanilla pod. Chill the bowl with the custard in an ice bath to cool quickly and prevent overcooking. Store in an airtight container for up to four days.
Serve Rhubarb Tart at room temperature or warm with crème anglaise.
* https://panistefa.com/rrrrabarrrbarrr-kompot-i-plyatsok-z-rabarbaru/
** Clear Jel, a modified corn starch used by commercial bakeries for fruit pies, can be purchased online. Two types of Clear Jel are available. I use Hoosier Hill Farm Clear Jel Powder Cook Type with raw fruit and Instant Type with cooked fruit filling.
Photo credits: All photos by Slava Johnson
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