Rhubarb

My first (and earliest association with the word “rhubarb” has to do with baseball, not soul food cooking: I have in mind a heated argument, involving the umpire, the team manager, and any number of players, with the inevitable result of someone getting ejected from the ball field. Nothing, in my opinion, more American than that particular moment, heated words being exchanged, dirt being kicked onto the shoes of the umpire, choleric faces within inches of one another. Shit. You can call soccer or futball the “beautiful game,” but nothing beats a rhubarb for sheer American poetry.

Here in Tel Aviv, we — if I can use this as a verb — know how to “rhubarb” extremely well. Virtually everything is source for verbal fisticuffs here. But do they know here how to take the same exact word and turn it into a pie? In this case a rhubarb-cherry pie?

The English lexicon is so much vaster, so much more portmanteau. How did we end up taking a plant with red and greenish stalks and this amazingly sharp taste and turn it into the stuff, literally, of arguments? There is, reading a bit between the lines of my OED, a rhetorical skein running through a bittersweet plant, something tart,a murmorous hubbub on stage among actors, strafing from a low-flying aircraft, a heated dispute, and ultimately nonsensical worthless stuff. Now that’s a dish worth biting into.