When Rhubarb is Love

by Carol Silver Elliott

 

We stopped at a Farmer’s Market the other day.  Always a happy sign that summer is finally here and we can find vegetables that taste like vegetables and fruit that for me, at any rate, is summer. Browsing the selection, my husband said, “Hey, they have rhubarb,” knowing, thoughtful man that he always is, that rhubarb is a favorite of mine and not always so easy to find.

 

Rhubarb and other veggies in hand, we headed home and I could not wait to cook the rhubarb. In fact, it never even made it into the refrigerator. From the counter to a quick bath in the sink to the pan it went. I don’t do anything fancy with rhubarb. I am not a strawberry rhubarb pie girl and I don’t make any of the other exciting recipes that I have seen that have rhubarb as a key ingredient. Rather, my cut up rhubarb, some water and some sugar simmer into rhubarb sauce on my stove top. 

 

As I stood there, stirring, the smell of the sweet and tart rhubarb brought me to a place of memory. I was an absolutely “picky” eater as a child, small for my age and finicky, a fact that ran counter to my parent’s, especially my dad’s parenting priorities. My dad, born in Poland, came to the United States as a teenager. He didn’t marry until much later in life and my brother and I were born when he was late 40’s and early 50’s. Dad knew hunger firsthand, so food for him meant not just health but survival, and not just love but necessity.

My father’s test of the severity of any illness was whether you could eat a piece of buttered toast. Mind you, he buttered all of the toast himself in our household, scraping the finest and thinnest coating of Breakstone butter over the bread possible. Food might matter, but waste and excess were something else entirely!

 

Difficult eater or not, there were things I clearly liked. One of them was coffee, which I demanded when I was 3. They gave it to me, black and no sugar, convinced I would not like it. Of course, coffee and I have not been separated since. In those days, my dad would go to the public market a couple of times each week and the one thing he brought home that I always loved was—you guessed it—rhubarb.

 

Rhubarb sauce never failed to appeal to me, no matter what the circumstances or what else was on the menu. The story that came to mind the other day, smelling that so familiar fragrance, was of my bout of chicken pox. They tell me I had a pretty severe case although my memory of it is, mercifully, sketchy. But I didn’t want to eat. And my dad was in a panic. What could he do?  What could he bring?  How could he entice me to take in some nutrition?

 

It was winter in Rochester, New York, not a place where rhubarb is readily available. It was snowing and cold and slippery and dangerous, but the family lore is that my dad set off in search of rhubarb, convinced he had to find it and that, by sheer force of will, he would. Sadly, his search was unsuccessful. There were no frozen options then and no stores that were somehow, magically, holding onto some stalks from the summer. He returned home empty-handed and, years later, my mother would tell the story of how hard he’d tried, how much it mattered to him.

 

The Book of Psalms (127:3) declares “children are an inheritance from the Lord.”  And the Talmud specifies a number of obligations including the concept that “the parent who teaches his son, it is as if he had taught his son, his son’s son, and so on to the end of generations.” (Talmud Kiddushin 36)  As parents, we not only safeguard and care for our children, we spread the reach of our values and our traditions far into the future—a future for our families and, in essence, a future for the Jewish people.

 

The message for me in all of this is that “the children come first.” Our parents, our grandparents and we, ourselves, live those words and make them a reality. We would do anything, sacrifice anything, and move any mountain to keep our children healthy and happy, to help them have lives of meaning and joy and value.

 

Putting our children first is what makes us who we are, defines our priorities and colors our existence. They are our gift and we are theirs, an exchange that is not always reciprocated or recognized but always there. From the simplest things, like the rhubarb sauce, to being there to support, counsel and believe—these words are a cornerstone “Remember, the children come first.”

 

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