Tag: rhubarb

Nellie’s Rhubarb Cake

When I asked if they had any rhubarb this year, my brother-in-law Patrick reported that it was doing great. He added that his eleven-year old granddaughter had helped him make his favorite rhubarb cake the day before. If only all grandfathers took the time to introduce their grandchildren to the pleasures of cooking!

Always looking for good recipes, I asked where he got the recipe. “It was Nellie’s,” he said, “the only rhubarb cake I remember her making. And I love it.” Nellie was Patrick’s stepmother. His mother died when he was four, and his father remarried when Patrick was six.

They lived in Hibbing, Minnesota, a few blocks from Robert Zimmerman. Patrick told me that you could hear Bob’s music over much of that Iron Range community as he and his friends jammed in the evening on the flat garage roof behind the Zimmerman home. His high school classmates predicted great things for the young musician in his graduation yearbook, but even they may have been surprised by their friend’s success as Bob Dylan.

Like Dylan, Nellie was originally from Duluth, Minnesota, but Patrick does not know if she got the recipe while she was growing up there or whether a friend shared it with her after she married his father. All he knows is that it is a great rhubarb cake.

And I agree.

INGREDIENTS:

1 cup sour milk
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup shortening
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups chopped rhubarb
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon

PROCEDURE:

Stir a teaspoon of cider vinegar into a cup of milk and let it sour as you prepare the rhubarb and dry ingredients. Preheat the oven to 350º. Clean and chop the rhubarb stalks into a quarter inch dice. Grease and flour a nine by thirteen inch cake pan.

Cream the sugar and shortening. Put the flour, soda and salt into a sifter and sift a half cup of flour into the creamed sugar. Stir it well with a wooden spoon. Beat the egg until it is lemon yellow and mix it with the milk. Pour about a third of the milk into the sugar and flour mixture and stir it until it is smooth. Stir in another half cup of flour, then another third cup of milk and beat the mixture until it is smooth. Repeat these steps, ending with the final half cup of flour and beat well.

Stir the vanilla and rhubarb into the batter and pour it into the pan.

Mix a teaspoon of cinnamon into a half cup of granulated sugar and use a teaspoon to sprinkle it evenly over the top of the batter.

Put the pan on a center shelf in the oven and bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes. Test for doneness after thirty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the middle of the cake should come out clean. If it does not, bake for another five minutes.

NOTE: This cake is especially good served warm.

Jean’s Rhubarb Bars

Every farm I remember from my childhood had at least a couple of big rhubarb plants in the backyard. Rhubarb used to be called “pie plant” because it makes delicious pies, but it also makes other great desserts from upside down cakes to marmalade. Jean’s rhubarb bars are a good example.

Jerri first had these bars at a funeral luncheon at the New Richmond United Methodist Church. She was so impressed with them that she found who made them and asked for the recipe. Jerri made them, and I loved them too.

However, Jerri has collected a lot of recipes over the years, and since she, like my mother, keeps them in boxes instead of a computer, occasionally a recipe disappears for years. This was the case with Jean’s rhubarb bar recipe. One day a few years ago she announced that she had found it again and would soon make some bars.

Weeks passed. And months. And one beautiful spring day when the rhubarb was beckoning, she discovered that the recipe had vanished once more. A couple of weeks ago when I said that I would really like to make that recipe and share it via the blog, she sat down at the bar with her recipe boxes.

Voilà! The recipe had miraculously reappeared in one of her recipe boxes. The instructions were a little vague but Jerri answered my questions, and the bars were delicious.

Jean died many years ago, but her memory lives with us and her other friends and in her rhubarb bars.

INGREDIENTS:

1 package yellow cake mix
1/2 cup flaked or shredded coconut
1/2 cup butter
3 cups fresh rhubarb
1 cup sugar
3 T flour
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 large egg
1 cup sour cream

PROCEDURE:

Put the cake mix into a large bowl. Stir the coconut into the mix and use a fork or pastry blender to cut in the butter. Make the crust by pressing the mixture into a nine by thirteen inch ungreased cake pan.

Preheat the oven to 350º and sift the sugar, flour and cinnamon into a small bowl.

Wash the rhubarb and cut the stems into a scant half inch dice. Put the rhubarb into a medium mixing bowl. Mix about three-fourths of the sugar mixture into the rhubarb, reserving a quarter cup to finish the bars. Spoon a layer of rhubarb on the crust.

Beat the egg in a small bowl until it is lemon yellow, then beat in a cup of sour cream. Spread the sour cream evenly over the rhubarb and sprinkle the remaining sugar mixture on top.

Bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes until lightly browned.

NOTES: Do not use a cake mix with pudding in it.

Jean noted that you can also make these bars with prepared pie filling. Use only a half cup of sugar with a teaspoon of cinnamon. Put the pie filling on the crust, spread two-thirds of the sugar over the filling, cover it with the sour cream mixture and sprinkle the remaining sugar on top.

Only the stems of the rhubarb plant are edible (though as someone said, “All foods are edible, but some only once”). The leaves contain poisonous compounds including oxalic acid, although a one hundred forty pound human would have to eat more than ten pounds of rhubarb leaves to consume a lethal dose of the toxin. Actually, rhubarb is cultivated by some cultures for its medical value. Traditional Chinese medicine, for instance, uses rhubarb roots as a laxative.