Is it a fruit or is it a vegetable? It is Rhubarb, one of its kind.
The history of rhubarb started as a medicine, with its roots used for medical purposes in China for thousands of years, with written records coming from The Classic of Herbal Medicine, a Chinese book on agriculture and medicinal plants, believed to have been written around 2800 BC.
Collected official histories of the Chinese Emperor dynasties contain many examples of the medical use of rhubarb, starting with the 6th century Emperor Wu of Liang who was given rhubarb to cure his fever yet only after a warning that it is the most potent drug and must be taken in great moderation.
The plant has been imported in Greece and Rome in circa 1st century, with written records coming from the Roman physician, pharmacologist and botanist Dioscorides, who in his De Materia Medica wrote that the plant has good medical properties and grew beyond the river Bosporus.
More precisely, the plant was to be found on the banks of the Volga and its name derived from the name of the river. The Greeks referred to the Volga as Rha, which was its ancient Scythian name and then adding brabarum, meaning ‘foreign’ (indeed, the word barbarian stems from the same root).
The strange plant which was grown by foreign folks along the Volga became a major export of Asia by the 10th century, yet the high transportation costs made rhubarb quite expensive in Medieval Europe, reaching several times the price of valuable herbs as cinnamon and saffron.
By the 13th century different varieties of the plant had been imported to Britain and mainly used for their medical properties.
Into the English language, the name of the plant came from the Old French rubarbe, to be firstly recorded in print in 1390, in The Pistel of Swete Susan poem. The next record describes the plant’s properties to neutralise the effects of excessive consumption of wine, along with being part of its making, and comes from 1475, from M. A. Manzalaoui’s Secretum Secretorium: “When the wine is taken outrageously..It causes the mouth to stink..he changed his nature as doth an herb called reubarbe.”
The first sources found of rhubarb’s culinary use date to the beginning of the 17th century and the first recorded recipe appears in the 1760s cookbook The complete confectioner: or the whole art of confectionary made plain and easy. … To which are added, some bills of fare for deserts for private families by Hannah Glasse: “To make rhubarb tarts. Take stalks of English rhubarb..peel and cut it the size of goosberries; sweeten it, and make them as you do goosberry tarts.”
The widespread consumption of rhubarb in Britain began in the early 19th century as an ingredient in desserts and wine making and in 1820 the plant made its first appearances in the United States.
Superfood rhubarb
Nowadays, rhubarb is classified as a superfood due to its numerous health benefits, in particular to cure constipation and inflammation and that it is quite calories-free, only 7 calories per 100 grams!
Since the 1920s, the term rhubarb entered the colloquial slang with the meanings of a murmurous background noise, an indistinct conversation, noise of a crowd, a word repeated by stage actors to give the impression of hubbub or conversation and even to name a nonsense or worthless stuff.
