The Last Stalks of Spring: A Farewell to Forced Rhubarb

A meditation on how a candlelit crop came to represent the very best of Yorkshire's identity.

As the soft mists of April coil lazily over the Pennine foothills and the loamy beds of West Yorkshire breathe a sigh of warmth, a quiet curtain falls on one of the strangest, most splendid of British rituals: the season of forced rhubarb. A pinker-than-pink swansong, sung not by harps or horns but by candlelight in long, dark sheds tucked between Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell - an unassuming trio that makes up England's mysteriously named "Rhubarb Triangle."

Here, in this modest nexus of northern grit and horticultural genius, the rhubarb does something rather odd. It grows, yes - but it does so in darkness, with such determined vigour that it creaks and pops audibly as it stretches itself towards a light that never comes. And thus, with a faintly Gothic flourish, the season comes to a close. The candles are snuffed out, the cloches lifted, and Yorkshire returns the rhubarb to its slumbering fields, content in the knowledge that it has once again pulled off an impressive sleight of hand.

To understand forced rhubarb is to understand something essential about Yorkshire itself: a blend of stoicism and showmanship, grit and grace, practical alchemy and poetic stubbornness. Forced rhubarb - a tender, blushing confection unlike its coarse, green, summer cousin - is grown with obsessive precision and an eerie intimacy. It begins in autumn, when roots are left to freeze in open fields, the chill crucial to converting starches into sugars. Then, when the frost has done its part, the roots are transplanted into heated, windowless forcing sheds, where they grow without photosynthesis - hence the sweetness, the tenderness, and that famous hue, somewhere between a lipstick smudge and a blushing cheek.

The secret, however, isn’t just in the frost and the dark. It’s also in the dirt - or more specifically, in what was thrown away. During the 19th century, as the Industrial Revolution thundered through the West Riding, textile mills churned out not just fabric but waste - the discarded fibres of wool and cotton from the production of “mungo” and “shoddy,” recycled cloths produced by grinding up old rags. This detritus, rich in nitrogen, found its way onto nearby farmland as a novel kind of fertiliser, and in the rhubarb triangle, it worked magic. The rhubarb roots, already partial to cold and careful husbandry, positively revelled in this gritty industrial compost.

Thus, from the literal shreds of Yorkshire’s rag trade sprang a crop of exceptional sweetness and delicacy. Forced rhubarb became an unlikely beneficiary of mechanised progress, a botanical phoenix from the soot.

This method, perfected in the 19th century, gave Yorkshire farmers an early spring crop and the nation a Victorian delicacy so sought-after that by the 1930s, special "rhubarb trains" ran from Wakefield to London, packed with stalks wrapped in straw. For a brief, glorious era, forced rhubarb was a glamour crop - a pink divinity in a pudding world. As one Victorian housewife’s diary exclaimed: “There is no better signal of spring's promise than the early rhubarb tart, still warm from the oven, still scented with the sugar that guards us from its sharp tongue.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The word rhubarb itself is a tale of barbarian intrigue. Etymologically, it traces back to the Latin rheubarbarum - "rha" from the River Rha (now the Volga), and barbarum, meaning foreign or barbarian. This was the exotic root from beyond the Roman pale, brought westward along the Silk Road, prized not for pies but for its medicinal properties - especially its cathartic qualities, which ensured rhubarb’s place in apothecaries long before it entered kitchens.

Indeed, its role in the medicine cabinet predates its culinary fame by centuries. In Elizabethan England, rhubarb was known not for its tangy stalks but for its purgative roots - a powerful, if rather drastic, treatment for the internal ills of humankind. Even Shakespeare name-checks it in Macbeth, where the eponymous thane, eyeing treachery and war, calls out:

“What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug, / Would scour these English hence?”

Here, rhubarb is not the harbinger of spring but of swift and merciless expulsion - a literal cleansing of the bowels and the battlefield.

But then came sugar. With it, rhubarb was tamed and transformed. By the 18th century, the British were dining on it in tarts and trifles, and by the 19th, it had moved from curiosity to craving. In Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, that renowned guide to Victorian domesticity, rhubarb is listed in dozens of forms - stewed, preserved, and baked - always with generous quantities of sugar, as if to reassure the reader that this “vegetable” (it is, technically, one) could indeed become dessert.

And what a versatile thing it remains. Forced rhubarb is not merely a dessert darling. Yes, it sings in compotes, custards, and fool. Yes, it makes a tart so vivid it could shame a flamingo. But it is also a curious companion to savoury dishes. Roasted with duck, it cuts the fattiness with electric brightness; pickled, it offers a whimsical crunch to a cheese board; simmered with ginger and vinegar, it becomes a chutney fit for pork or sharp cheddar. There is rhubarb gin, of course, as British as drizzle - and rhubarb syrup to swirl into champagne, because why not go full Gatsby?

Photo by Natalie Behn on Unsplash

Perhaps it is this blend of elegance and oddity that makes rhubarb so Yorkshire. It is a crop that demands hard labour and exacting knowledge - a dance of freezing and forcing, sugar and steam, shoddy and soot - yet the result is something dreamlike, almost ethereal. It grows underground, unseen, ungreen, and when it emerges, it is as if some perfumed ghost of spring has risen in pink silk.

Yorkshire’s forced rhubarb even earned itself a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) in 2010, joining such gastronomic aristocracy as Champagne, Parma ham, and Roquefort cheese. There is something rather triumphant in that, as if the humble allotments of Morley and the work-worn hands of West Riding growers had finally received their overdue standing ovation.

It’s worth quoting George Orwell here, who in The Road to Wigan Pier reflected on the English working-class diet with a mixture of disdain and nostalgia. He complained of the “appalling waste of good vegetables,” but also noted how, in the harsh north, people could “do amazing things with scraps and roots.” One suspects that if Orwell had been handed a plate of rhubarb crumble made with the finest Yorkshire produce, he might have written a different sort of essay - perhaps not about poverty, but about how northern inventiveness can coax luxury from mud and candlelight.

And so, as we bid adieu to the season, let us raise a spoon, or perhaps a glass of pink-hued fizz, to the end of the rhubarb harvest. For a few months each year, Yorkshire becomes the world capital of a surreal delight. And when the season ends, quietly and tenderly, with a rustle of straw and a sigh of steam, we are reminded that sometimes, the most extraordinary beauty comes not from the sun, but from the dark.

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FOODIE QUOTE OF THE DAY:

‘‘Rhubarb: essence of stomach ache.’’

- Ambrose Bierce

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