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The English vegetable picked by candlelight - Forced rhubarb -BBC
Forced rhubarb – a vegetable deprived of sunlight for extra sweetness – has been eaten in Yorkshire for centuries. Now the culinary treasure is having a renaissance.
At first there was a pop, then a mesmerising sound that drifted through the air like crackling wildfire. An unfamiliar snap and fizz echoed from the inky blackness, followed by another wonderfully alien noise and a phantom whisper of gently rustling leaves. “Listen,” Janet Oldroyd Hulme murmured excitedly. “This is the moment of reckoning.”
It was a Friday lunchtime, and Oldroyd Hulme was peering through a dark, cavernous doorway into what she calls her ‘unearthly world’ – a hangar-sized shed alive with the sound of several types of rhubarb in varying stages of accelerated growth. The vegetable was growing so fast, the air seemed to ripple with applause as it matured. The green-leaved, pink-stalked plant was familiar to me, but the situation was not.
Forced rhubarb – a vegetable deprived of sunlight for extra sweetness – has been eaten in Yorkshire for centuries. Now the culinary treasure is having a renaissance.
At first there was a pop, then a mesmerising sound that drifted through the air like crackling wildfire. An unfamiliar snap and fizz echoed from the inky blackness, followed by another wonderfully alien noise and a phantom whisper of gently rustling leaves. “Listen,” Janet Oldroyd Hulme murmured excitedly. “This is the moment of reckoning.”
It was a Friday lunchtime, and Oldroyd Hulme was peering through a dark, cavernous doorway into what she calls her ‘unearthly world’ – a hangar-sized shed alive with the sound of several types of rhubarb in varying stages of accelerated growth. The vegetable was growing so fast, the air seemed to ripple with applause as it matured. The green-leaved, pink-stalked plant was familiar to me, but the situation was not.