Is it the sweet and sticky rhubarb crumble served with lashings of thick and gooey custard? Crunching on freshly picked rhubarb stalks dipped in sugar? Or maybe it is savouring sugar-dusted rhubarb and custard boiled sweeties from a paper bag? What is your earliest memory of tasting rhubarb?
“Dipping rhubarb stalks into a big bowl of sugar in my neighbour’s garden stands out most to me,” says Hannah Clinch, avid rhubarb grower and co-founder of Dunoon Goes POP. “When I was little, me and my sister would climb under our fence to Mrs Ward’s garden when we saw her and her friend out on the sun loungers. They would have fresh rhubarb stalks and a big bowl of sugar to dip them into.”
Eating fresh rhubarb on a warm summer day is a childhood memory shared by many of us lucky enough to have a grandparent, parent or neighbour with a rhubarb patch. Rhubarb is a staple flavour of the British palate and one of the iconic flavours of our Dunoon Goes POP soft drinks.
Easy to grow. Easy to cook. And tastes like summer. It’s clear to see why unfussy rhubarb is so popular. But let’s find out a bit more about how this plant, which originates from Asia, came to be an iconic British cooking flavour and garden plant.
Cultivating Rhubarb
Using rhubarb (Rheum x hybridum cultivars) in our kitchens is a reasonably modern practice in Britain’s culinary history. We grow a couple of different heritage cultivars in the new Dunoon Goes POP garden, including Victoria and Champagne, and a vigorous unknown variety donated from a home on West Bay that is affectionately nicknamed Mrs Patterson’s rhubarb.
Rhubarb garden hybrids with their rich red edible stalks have been used as a foodstuff in Britain since the 1800s, flavouring puddings, drinks and preserves. There’s a particular pudding that inspired the first of our rhubarb-flavoured soft drinks.
“When I think about rhubarb, it is always with the ‘and custard’ on the end,” says Manda Forster, master mixologist and co-founder of Dunoon Goes POP. “One of my standout memories of eating rhubarb as a child was rhubarb crumble with custard, which was made from rhubarb from our garden or one of my grandmas’ gardens.”
This sweet and sticky pudding favourite influenced the first rhubarb-flavoured Dunoon Goes POP syrups that we ever sold to the public. Inspired by Dunoon Burgh Hall architect Robert ‘Bob’ Bryden, and flavoured using Dunoon-grown rhubarb with a splash of vanilla essence, Rhubob & Custard is one of our three rhubarb flavours alongside Rhubob & Ginger and Rhubob & Orange.
A favourite plant and a fascinating history
Rhubarb is one of our favourite plants here at Dunoon Goes POP. It grows well in our Dunoon gardens, thriving in our cool winters and mild and wet summers. Its tangy flavour makes a refreshing pink drink! Rhubarb also has a fascinating history of smuggling, international trade monopolies and pudding making.
The history of the ingredients we use fascinates us, and we're interested in:
where our ingredients originate from,
how our ingredients came to be used by Britain to build its Empire and what we can learn from this,
any connections the plant has with Dunoon and Cowal,
interesting food or drinks making heritage.
Five interesting things we've learned from our rhubarb research so far
1. It has a much longer history as a medicinal plant
In China, people have used the root of certain rhubarb species to treat illnesses for thousands of years. This was long before we started growing and cooking the stalks of rhubarb Rheum x hybridum cultivars in Britain. These garden hybrids come from a large family of related rhubarb (Rheum spp.) plants. Not all are edible or medicinal!
If you are a bit backed up or have the runs, Traditional Chinese Medicine suggests using the root of Rheum palmatum, Chinese rhubarb, to treat these tricky tummy issues. But don’t try this yourself! Always consult a specialist for the right treatment and dosage.
Using rhubarb for medicine became popular beyond China and its early trade and cultivation was for the root, so that physicians could prescribe its medicinal properties.
Side note. The leaves of our garden rhubarb cultivars are not edible and you will feel very ill if you try to eat them.
2. Rhubarb seeds were once worth more than gold
Outside of China, Russia was one of the first, and one of the largest, traders of rhubarb species before we started cultivating it in Europe. From the 1750s to the 1850s, during the Romanov Empire, Russia capitalised on the trade of this Chinese plant to support their economy. Russia held on to their monopoly on the trade of rhubarb by trading its roots and banning the export of seeds. For a time, the seeds of rhubarb were more valuable than gold!
3. A doctor smuggled rhubarb seeds into Scotland!
Seeds came back to Scotland from Russia through Dr James Mounsey (1710–1773), a Scottish physician employed by the Romanov Empire. When his time in Russia came to an abrupt end, he smuggled the desirable rhubarb seeds back to Scotland and hid them in his Dumfrieshire home.
Fearing Russian assassins, Dr Mounsey slept with a firearm by his bed and inserted two doors in each room in his house to ease an escape. Passing on the burden and the opportunity, in 1763, Mounsey gave a pound of the valuable seeds to Sir Alexander Dick of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh and Dr John Hope, King’s botanist and Professor of Materia Medica. Sir Alexander successfully cultivated rhubarb by sowing the seeds in the garden of his Edinburgh home, Prestonfield, which is a luxury hotel today with a restaurant called Rhubarb.
Both Dr Mounsey and Sir Alexander were awarded a gold medal of the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1770 to acknowledge the roles they played in introducing rhubarb cultivation to Scotland.
4. We used to sweeten rhubarb with liquorice
Liquorice root, angelica stems and sweet cicely were all once, and are still sometimes, used to take the tartness out of rhubarb stems. When we first began eating rhubarb in Britain, we looked to other accessible plants to make our rhubarb taste sweeter.
Liquorice, like rhubarb, has a long medicinal history. But, it also has a long history of being used in drinks making. Brewers have traditionally used liquorice to add colour and flavour to ales such as stouts and porters. This botanical sweetener has long been used in soft drinks and cordials. We are growing liquorice in the new Dunoon Goes POP garden, and this long-rooted plant will be brought under cover over winter.
5. Sugar turned rhubarb into a kitchen favourite
The sugar trade – and therefore, the slave trade – was integral to the adoption of rhubarb hybrids as a garden and farm-grown crop in Britain.
In the 1800s, British cultivation of rhubarb increased dramatically as cane sugar became readily available and more affordable. Sugar, the key sweetener of tart rhubarb, made the plant more palatable and desirable as an ingredient.
In many ways, the rise of rhubarb as a British classic flavour was influenced by the transatlantic sugar and slave trade.
Interested in Dunoon’s connections with the sugar and slave trade? We hope to share our findings on that soon! This will include what we’ve found out about politician, sugar plantation and slave owner James Ewing, who built Dunoon’s Castle House in 1822.
Rhubarb Green Map
Yorkshire has the Rhubarb Triangle. Could Dunoon have the Rhubarb Rhombus?
Add your rhubarb patch to our Green Map of Rhubarb Growers in Dunoon. This helps us to get a sense of how many rhubarb growers there are in Dunoon.
Inspired by local people and plants
Our Dunoon Goes POP flavours are inspired by local people (People of Place) and plants.
POP inspiration
Robert Bryden (1841 to 1906), the architect who designed the iconic Dunoon Burgh Hall, which is now the creative and cultural hub for Dunoon and Cowal. He is buried in Dunoon Cemetery. Read more here
Dunoon Goes POP rhubarb and Robert ‘Bob’ Bryden-inspired flavours
Rhubob & Custard
Rhubob & Orange
Rhubob & Ginger
We combined the traditional pudding flavour of rhubarb and custard to create the very first of our soft drinks syrups to be sold here in Dunoon, to celebrate 150 years of Dunoon Burgh Hall.
If you fancy reading more
Here's where we found some of our ingredient information
Learn more about the Rhubarb Triangle:
A few books which gave us some more context:
Hidden Histories: Herbs by K Hurst (2015) and published by Timber Press.
Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine by Andrew Chevallier (2016) and published by DK.
The Gardener’s Atlas by Dr John Grishaw (1998) and published by Firefly.
The Plant Hunter’s Atlas by Ambra Edwards and published by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
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