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by Sandra Dallas For pioneer families who had survived the winter on meat, potatoes
and dried-apple pie, one of the nicest harbingers of spring was the
sight of furled green leaves on bright pink stalks poking up through
the earth.
Rhubarb still is one of nature's gifts to the dinner table, but it was even more highly prized in Colorado¹s early mining towns because of the year-around dearth of fresh fruits and vegetables. Pioneer women brought rhubarb seeds with them on the Overland Trail, sowing them beside their log cabins and sod houses. Long after the houses had returned to the earth, the rhubarb, which requires virtually no tending, still thrived. Ghost town buffs know that a clump of rhubarb on the prairie or in a mountain valley means that a dwelling once stood nearby. As the pioneers settled in, they established kitchen gardens behind their houses, and rhubarb was one of their favorite plants. In Georgetown, rhubarb beds dating back decades and perhaps a century or more, grow in the yards of many houses and along the roadways. There is a particularly nice rhubarb clump just north of the deserted brick school building on Taos Street. Rhubarb leaves are toxic (they do have a use in certain tanning processes,) but the tender stalks, which are inedible raw, were cooked into puddings and sauces, jams and conserves by pioneer housewives. The settlers'favorite way to prepare rhubarb, of course, was in pies. In fact, rhubarb was so popular as a pie filling that it was known as "pieplant." There is a Pieplant Creek in Gunnison County and a town in Taylor Park near Tin Cup called Pieplant. Home to 100 people a century ago, Pieplant is now a ghost town. Domestic rhubarb, which seeds itself, is easy to grow in the harsh, rocky soil of the mountain states, but it is not native to the West or even to the U.S. Rhubarb was grown in ancient China, but our plants most likely had their origin in Russia, where rhubarb was first used for medicinal purposes. Americans, too, used rhubarb extract and syrup for a variety of ills, including "bowel-complaints" and dyspepsia, a 19th century term for indigestion. An 1866 medicinal catalogue recommended 15 drops for children needing a laxative. Most mid-19th century all-purpose household medical guides recommended rhubarb extracts, and many western immigrants carried rhubarb tinctures overland in their medicine chests.
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Rhubarb technically is a vegetable, but Victorian cookbooks, including those published in Colorado, contained recipes that called for rhubarb to be prepared as a fruit. Today, we use rhubarb in cheesecakes, cobblers and cakes, as sauce for pork, ham and fowl, in muffins and quick breads, and even as a stand-alone vegetable. But 19th century cooks pretty much limited rhubarb to the jam and pie categories. Oddly enough, cookbooks rarely called for strawberries to be combined with rhubarb, as many recipes do today to cut the rhubarb¹s tartness. But then, of course, few strawberry plants came west with the pioneers. Following are recipes from early-day cookbooks. Rhubarb Pie Rhubarb Marmalade Rhubarb Conserve Rhubarb Sauce Rhubarb Pie Rhubarb Pie
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