Some words carry flavor. Speak aloud the familiar syllables of coffee, chocolate or toast, and the brain fires memories of taste. Flash: a steaming cup of Sumatra, soft and gently acidic washes over your tongue. Your first taste of waxy chocolate Easter bunny as it melted in your mouth. Fresh baked bread, made golden from the heat of a toaster, on a cold winter day.
When I speak the words strawberry and rhubarb, I am given a crystalline remembrance with my grandmother. It’s a summer’s day in the 1980’s. I’m in my Grandmother’s tiny kitchen and staring at a pie she’s placed atop her ancient, four-legged cast iron stove to cool.
“It’s strawberry rhubarb pie,” she tells me. She slices into the golden pie crust and it falls away to expose a pink heart of strawberries and softened rhubarb. I take a bite—it’s the first time I’ve ever tasted these two flavors together—and I am struck by the sweet, earthy flavors of strawberry and tart-like-a-lemon rhubarb. The flavors are complex, almost too adult for me, were it not for all the enticing sugar.
“This is rhubarb?” I say to her, knowing the look of the plant from hours of playing make-believe in our family garden. The stalks of the plant resemble celery and the rough green canopy of leaves grow high enough to make a perfect hiding place for me—a child of five or six–from the sun.
I enjoy another bite of memory and it’s gone.
Though my interest was piqued to recreate Grammie’s strawberry rhubarb pie in my own kitchen, my desire for simplicity got the best of me. Rather than make a crisp (I’m always looking for ways around making a pie crust from scratch), I settled on modifying a recipe for a rhubarb and pistachio compote my friend Louisa Shafia created for her cookbook, Lucid Food.