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Rhubarb

I think they're both just one of those tastes that seemed a lot more sweet and luxurious in a time when you couldn't easily go out and buy coma-inducing amounts of sugary dessert from any Tesco.

We still like our faggots West and South of, I dunno, Swindon.
Also rhubarb tends to come into season well before strawberries and raspberries and the other 'garden fruit' that used to be all you could get, in the 'olden days'. When stuff was seasonal. So rhubarb would be the first fresh 'fruit' you got, after having eaten nothing but progressively soggier and older apples all winter.
 
Also rhubarb tends to come into season well before strawberries and raspberries and the other 'garden fruit' that used to be all you could get, in the 'olden days'. When stuff was seasonal. So rhubarb would be the first fresh 'fruit' you got, after having eaten nothing but progressively soggier and older apples all winter.

Yes, you'd get 'keeping' apples some of which even improved after a few months in storage (Ashmeads Kernel is nice). Takes a bit of effort to find them now. I'm old enough to just about remember 'early' apples in the shops but that's about it.

The last real bit of seasonality is the greengages and then the 'proper' (English) plums in August, now they really are sweet. Bit of a tangent there
 
The last real bit of seasonality is the greengages and then the 'proper' (English) plums in August, now they really are sweet.
How about damsons? Out local farm shop has them at the end of August, start of September. And sloes are no good until you've got a frost on them.
 
How about damsons? Out local farm shop has them at the end of August, start of September. And sloes are no good until you've got a frost on them.
I love a damson - I’ve come across them sometimes on country walks & it’s always a treat. Small, but concentrated flavour.
 
I love a damson - I’ve come across them sometimes on country walks & it’s always a treat. Small, but concentrated flavour.
My old house had damson trees in the garden, at the end of a jungle of nettles and undergrowth. Some years there was such a profusion of fruit it was worth battling through to pick, but most years the trees only bore a few damsons each, so we just left them.
 
Yeah, well, I'm the sort of person who lays their hands on anything vaguely edible, cooks it up in her chutney pot and sticks it in jars.

But most things can be put in chutney
 
Rhubarb is a summer thing in Norway and is used for many things, including dipping rhubarb in sugar and eat it.
The sweet and sour sugar kick was good. Summers in the 70s as a kid were good.
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My old house had damson trees in the garden, at the end of a jungle of nettles and undergrowth. Some years there was such a profusion of fruit it was worth battling through to pick, but most years the trees only bore a few damsons each, so we just left them.

I find damsons tend to be a bit one year on, one year off. I don't have the cookery skills to make damson cheese and that sort of stuff, but damson gin / vodka/ whatever is very, very easy to make and always turns out nicely. And they're good straight off the tree if you leave them long enough.
 
There's rhubarb in my garden. Unfortunately last year's crop gave me indigestion and I'm now wary about trying it again.
 
As a kid I used to eat sorrel stalks as well, no idea why as they tasted of vinegar. Was this a thing for anyone else?
 
I cannot tell you how much I love Rhubarb, never had it in a chutney but I’m willing to try any chutney.
Problem is I get recurring kidney stones and Oxalic Acid is one fucker at contributing to kidney stones.
 
They look like they are for show.

Go look at the woks in your Honourable local Chinese Takeaway...
I had this conversation/argument with my sister in law, a lady whose sole recreation appears to be cleaning everything to create a house that could double up as a show home, a place where open-heart surgery could be performed on the kitchen table. She got aerated - badly - about the "filthy condition" of the Yorkshire Pudding tins. She would not be told when I pointed out that you just brush loose crap off them, fill with oil and batter, then bung them in a very hot oven. Whatever you do, you do not make the mistake of ever actually trying to wash them as this ruins the process and means you can only scrape them out of the tin in shreds. She just did not accept this, even when I said that repeated baking at a very high gas mark means they're sterile. And if any bug survives that, then everybody's doomed and microbes will inherit the Earth. Is there a thread anywhere on OCD as a Fortean thing?
 
Yes, you'd get 'keeping' apples some of which even improved after a few months in storage (Ashmeads Kernel is nice). Takes a bit of effort to find them now. I'm old enough to just about remember 'early' apples in the shops but that's about it.

The last real bit of seasonality is the greengages and then the 'proper' (English) plums in August, now they really are sweet. Bit of a tangent there
RHS Gardens Wisley used to have an apple week in Autumn where they sold apples grown in the gardens. Unfortunately, the place has become more of a theme park lately :omr: and this event doesn't appear on their website. (Dog walking, craft fairs and Easter egg hunts :ranting: but not apple sales)

I bought some "winter banana" one year, yellow apple that really did have a banana taste. So many varieties not available now swamped under mountains of tasteless pappy mush in a waxy red skin.
 
RHS Gardens Wisley used to have an apple week in Autumn where they sold apples grown in the gardens. Unfortunately, the place has become more of a theme park lately :omr: and this event doesn't appear on their website. (Dog walking, craft fairs and Easter egg hunts :ranting: but not apple sales)

I bought some "winter banana" one year, yellow apple that really did have a banana taste. So many varieties not available now swamped under mountains of tasteless pappy mush in a waxy red skin.
Try and get to Waterperry gardens in Oxfordshire when they do their Apple days. They grow all sorts of varieties and they sell a lot of them on the day. The UK is perfect for growing apples, there are thousands of varieties we shouldn’t really just be eating Pink Lady https://www.waterperrygardens.co.uk/event/apple-weekend/
 
Try and get to Waterperry gardens in Oxfordshire when they do their Apple days. They grow all sorts of varieties and they sell a lot of them on the day. The UK is perfect for growing apples, there are thousands of varieties we shouldn’t really just be eating Pink Lady https://www.waterperrygardens.co.uk/event/apple-weekend/
Thanks, I will it isn't that far.
Once many years ago at the Harrogate Flower Show I spoke to someone from the Northern Fruit Group (You’d have been proud of me, my face didn’t even twitch)
He reckoned that warming temperatures were forcing proper apple growing further north. French apples being only good for cider or cooking. Soon, he reckoned, Kent and Somerset would be too warm.
As evidence he offered:
French Golden Delicious, green and mushy
New Zealand Golden Delicious, Yellow and crisp
I’ve never seen the latter but once worked with a New Zealander who’d just bought some French Golden delicious. I won’t repeat what he said but it wasn’t complimentary.
Don’t know how true this is but most apples in supermarkets now are appalling, Cox’s or Russets being about the best
Sorry strayed from rhubarb and don’t get me on the rock hard pinky/orange/green things they sell as tomatoes.
 
We kids used to be given 'rhubarb juice' which was the excess sugary fluid produced by the cooking process. Mmm.

We'd also enjoy dipping a stick of raw rhubarb into sugar and biting the end off. The original sweet and sour.
When I was about 11 I was ill for some time and very bored at home away from school, and a family friend did what she could and gave me some of her daughter's old Bunty for Girls annuals. They gave me unique although archaic and almost certainly inaccurate insights into the workings of the minds of my female classmates. Anyway, the details escape me, but there was a story in one of them about a public school girl (as always) with access to a kangaroo that feasted on sticks of rhubarb dipped in sugar.

I don't know why this has stayed with me since, but it has. And, er, that's it. As you were.
 
Bunty is definitely due for a resurgence for girls names. How you get to it from Elizabeth I have no idea.
 
When I was about 11 I was ill for some time and very bored at home away from school, and a family friend did what she could and gave me some of her daughter's old Bunty for Girls annuals. They gave me unique although archaic and almost certainly inaccurate insights into the workings of the minds of my female classmates. Anyway, the details escape me, but there was a story in one of them about a public school girl (as always) with access to a kangaroo that feasted on sticks of rhubarb dipped in sugar.

I don't know why this has stayed with me since, but it has. And, er, that's it. As you were.
Similar'ere, except instead of the Four Marys and kangaroo access I had a pile of footer annuals.

Innocent anecdotes about Bobby Charlton, George Best, Nobby Stiles and co. were illustrated with black and white photos of players with neatly-combed hair and wearing jerseys. Absolutely nothing sank in. :chuckle:
 
Thanks, I will it isn't that far.
Once many years ago at the Harrogate Flower Show I spoke to someone from the Northern Fruit Group (You’d have been proud of me, my face didn’t even twitch)
He reckoned that warming temperatures were forcing proper apple growing further north. French apples being only good for cider or cooking. Soon, he reckoned, Kent and Somerset would be too warm.
As evidence he offered:
French Golden Delicious, green and mushy
New Zealand Golden Delicious, Yellow and crisp
I’ve never seen the latter but once worked with a New Zealander who’d just bought some French Golden delicious. I won’t repeat what he said but it wasn’t complimentary.
Don’t know how true this is but most apples in supermarkets now are appalling, Cox’s or Russets being about the best
Sorry strayed from rhubarb and don’t get me on the rock hard pinky/orange/green things they sell as tomatoes.
Various fruits, including apples and rhubarb, need a period of chilling to initiate bud formation and i guess soon the south of the UK won’t be able to provide sufficient cold in the winter to provide that. I believe the RHS has moved their National Collection of rhubarb to RHS Bridgewater outside Manchester as it will be happier (than, presumably, Surrey). It will certainly get more rainfall.
 
I cannot tell you how much I love Rhubarb, never had it in a chutney but I’m willing to try any chutney.
Problem is I get recurring kidney stones and Oxalic Acid is one fucker at contributing to kidney stones.
I thought only the leaves had oxalic acid and that the stalks were ok (for oxalic acid). I do know that that is why you never eat the leaves.

Here in southern Ontario, rhubarb is only available mid to late spring. Summer temps makes it bolt quickly.
 
Bunty is definitely due for a resurgence for girls names. How you get to it from Elizabeth I have no idea.
Women of my age may take agin' it because of its connotations.

There was a legendary girls' game spoken of, called, yes, 'Bunty', in which the object was for a girl to jab a forefinger as far under a female schoolmate's crotch as possible while shouting 'Bunty!'
The idea was to take the girl by surprise. It was then up to her to Bunty another girl or take direct revenge on her Buntier.

I first heard about this game at my first primary school which I left at the age of ten.
Having given it some thought, I'm vaguely remembering that some girls played it back then and were quickly rounded up and sternly told off.

The fact that everyone seemed to know about it, the girls anyway, was borne out by the stifled giggles that greeted the sight of the Bunty girls' comic at school or in the newsagents.
 
Women of my age may take agin' it because of its connotations.

There was a legendary girls' game spoken of, called, yes, 'Bunty', in which the object was for a girl to jab a forefinger as far under a female schoolmate's crotch as possible while shouting 'Bunty!'
The idea was to take the girl by surprise. It was then up to her to Bunty another girl or take direct revenge on her Buntier.

I first heard about this game at my first primary school which I left at the age of ten.
Having given it some thought, I'm vaguely remembering that some girls played it back then and were quickly rounded up and sternly told off.

The fact that everyone seemed to know about it, the girls anyway, was borne out by the stifled giggles that greeted the sight of the Bunty girls' comic at school or in the newsagents.
Maybe it was a northern thing - never heard of it in the south. I did have a mate who was a comic fan & claimed to like Bunty. I also had an aunty Bunty who wasn’t really an aunt but was a more distant relation whose exact connection to my family I’m now not certain of - I’ve always had trouble working out slightly distant family relationships.
 
Bunty is definitely due for a resurgence for girls names. How you get to it from Elizabeth I have no idea.
It's a diminutive, as when William becomes Bill or Billy, or when a Henry is known as Harry. Sometimes barely a syllable of the original remains. It's helpful where there are relatively few acceptable first names to go round.

In my infant/primary school of the 1960s about a third of the kids were called David or Susan. This intrigued me at the time as my own family had what I now know are Celtic names, unusual for the area. There was certainly only one Scargie. :chuckle:
 
I grew up in the country in Ireland, on the Laois, Kildare border - the very middle of horsey country.

Our old house was an extended cottage of vernacular design, with 4' thick mud and stone walls and 10' internal ceilings. It was surrounded by an orchard that was at least as old as the house, if not more. My dad kept bees, grew veg and fruit, and we always foragged for various seasonal things from wild cherries in July, then wild strawberries and blackberries through to beech nuts, hazelnuts and mushrooms come the mists of autumn.

My ma used to make what we called tarts, but most would call pies, from the apples and rhubarb, as well as gooseberries and damsons. We kept ponies, so there was ever an abundant supply of maure for the fruits trees and rose bushes. We were a large family, so Ma used to make the tarts in baking trays by the square yard! It wasn't unusual for visitors to the house, in the most informal sense, to simply lift a square of it as they greeted you in your own kitchen of a morning. :)

We too used to take the rhubarb stalks and dip them in sugar, and sometimes cream first, and crunch the goodness out of the fibres. Rhubarb with properly matured horse manure is essentially turbo-charged!

Farmers across the road would come over to trade their glass house tomatoes for our fruit, or honey, or bread. They had a freezer, and often forgot to take out the bread and would appear at teatime sheepishly to swap something for bread that wasn't sub zero. We also used to get raw milk from them.

We made elderberry wine and cordial, and just generally enjoyed the bounty of land around us.

Today, I bring my kids to pick blackberries and nuts, and regularly go back to my parent's house to raid the garden and the orchard. We also go for walks by the river to pick wild garlic and I make a pesto that would make your eyes water :)

My wife has adapted a Nigella Lawson recipe for a spicey apple chutney made from the ancient apple breeds of the orchard and we gift it to the cheese lovers in our lives at Christmas. People keep on our goodside at this time of year, for fear of falling of the chutney list. ;)
I always joke that it is organic and low miles, but cannot be gauranteed against child labour, as my kids love to scramble up the trees for the best apples.

Even today, when I make apples tarts the way my ma did, a slice of that for breakfast (a regular choice in my house) is akin to Proust's madeleine.

I have to go now. I've something in my eye.
 
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