Happy May Day! My middle sister spent her college years at a small Seven Sisters school known for both its academic rigor and its fondness for Anglophile-ish, slightly archaic traditions (lots of teas there). On May 1st, the president of the college would ride into campus on a white horse, and students wore flower crowns and white dresses and sang hymns to the May before having strawberries and cream for breakfast.

White horses, sadly, do not have full representation in my part of Temescal. But the strawberries from just south of here are finally starting to get sweet (all that rain delayed the season somewhat). If you look, you can probably find some rhubarb, too. Any new kind of fruit is very welcome right now, during this season when the weather feels like spring but winter's kales and citrus are still hanging on.

Rhubarb

Remember that rainy scene in the beginning of Animal Vegetable Miracle, when author Barbara Kingsolver, in the first week of her locavore experiment, is despondent at the thought of returning home to her banana-less household with no fruit? Drenched by a spring downpour, she splashes through the farmers' market and is rewarded at last with a beautiful bundle of red-stemmed rhubarb.

Unless you're a gardener and an old-fashioned pie-lover, you've probably never seen rhubarb growing, and you might not recognize it even if you did. A perennial plant, it forms a low, leafy mound, with wide spinachy leaves the size of a hat. Look under the leaves and you'll see long, reddish stalks coming up from the ground. Grip one firmly and pull it out. Trim off the mildly toxic leaf, and there you have it, a sour, sour stalk of what used to be called pieplant.

Still, it doesn't take much sweetening to bring out its lovely tangy fruitiness, one that matches incredibly well with both strawberries and orange.

Lots of recipes tell you to put the rhubarb through all sorts of elaborate machinations before putting it in the pie. What a bunch of, well, rhubarb! Just cut it up, toss it with sugar and a little cornstarch, and you're on your way to pie heaven. The only caveat is that rhubarb contains a lot of water, which the sugar will pull out, so you want to make your filling just before you're ready to bake your pie. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of small pieces of fruit floating in a big puddle of syrupy liquid.

Don't go overboard with the cornstarch; being juicy is one of this pie's homemade charms. Vanilla ice cream is the perfect accompaniment.

Because this is a very juicy pie, it's good to use a lattice crust to let the steam out. Yes, making a proper lattice does take some concentration and a little finger-dexterity, but I find the few minutes' effort to be well-rewarded by the amazement this fancy-pants basket weave inspires. If, for some smart reason, your utensil drawer contains a little crinkled-edged pastry or ravioli wheel, now's the time to use it. It will make your pie crust look incredibly 1950s-cute.

So, this is how you do it: Lay your longest strip of dough across the middle of the pie. Then lay another long strip crosswise across the middle. Lay another strip down next the first. Then lay down another crosswise strip, only weave it under the first strip and over the second one. Keep doing this, alternating vertical and horizontal strips, lifting the strips as necessary to get that cute under-and-over pattern. If your strip breaks, just jam the pieces back together or hide the broken parts under another strip.

You can make this either as one pie or six three- to four-inch tarts. In order to get the right crust-to-fruit ratio, I would use tart pans or ramekins that are at least two inches deep.

Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Range through the jam shelves of your local fancy-food shop (or your own pantry), and you'll find a lot of fancy-pants jam. You know the kind I mean: the ones with four fruits and three spices and a couple of liqueurs thrown in, the kiwi-lime-guava preserves, the blueberry-tangerine-coriander-gewurztraminer jellies. These are especially prevalent in tourist areas with gourmet pretensions (hello, Napa!) where the desired clientele is looking for pricier thrills than the usual fudge and hot sauce.

Someone, maybe you, is buying these, opening the jar once, and then consigning it to a sticky eternity behind the tarragon-Riesling mustard in the fridge door. And short of being dug out once more to glaze a chicken breast, there it stays, while on the front shelf the plain old jar of Smuckers strawberry is replaced again and again.

How do I know this? Because I'm insatiably, sneakily curious about everyone's eating and shopping habits. Lately I've been doing a lot of house-sitting for friends (and friends of friends), and I'll admit it: if I'm sleeping in your house, whatever is under your bed or stashed in your medicine cabinets is safe from me. Furry pink handcuffs, the leftover magic mushrooms from Burning Man, leather whatever: I'll never even bother to look.

By the time you get back, however, I will be able to give you a full inventory of your kitchen. I will know if you have a muffin pan (and puzzle mightily for hours if you don't), whether you drink tea or coffee, and where you keep the grater and the whisks. Is your baking powder is this year's vintage or bought 3 boyfriends ago? Did you even know there was a unopened package of candied ginger at the back of the cupboard next to the fridge? I won't drain your special single malt or break into the $10 Scharffenberger baking bar, but I'll know you better by the company your pantry keeps.

And what you're not eating are those fancy jams. I also know this because, like most beginning jam makers, I used to make those kinds of jams, and give them to you as lovely house presents at any opportunity. The rum-brown-sugar-peach-nectarine preserves, I was so proud of them! The Meyer lemon chutney from food writer/novelist Laurie Colwin's recipe, carefully aged for a couple months just as she recommends. Blueberry with Cointreau, plums with Bordeaux: I made them, you accepted them with grace (thanks, Mom!) and then you hinted, ever so gently, that maybe you didn't want rum anything on your toast in the morning. What you wanted was what everyone wants: Strawberry jam. Apricot preserves. Blackberry jelly. Raspberry jam, straight up and tasting of summery sun-warmed fruit, with just enough sugar to round out the fruit's natural sweetness.

So these are the jams I make now, and if you want the recipients of your jam-making largesse to actually devour your wares with pleasure, rather than sadly leaving them on the shelf, testaments to more good will than good mornings, this is what you will do, too.

Start with the best and most-loved, strawberry jam. But not the easiest. For all its gingham-y, morning-in-America, come on in and sit right down and make yourself at home aura, the strawberry actually has some fussy little habits. For starters, pectin. Or the lack of it: strawberries are right up there with cherries in the low-pectin pantheon. Which means that unlike its high-pectin friend, the blackberry (which practically jams itself given a little sugar and a quick, frothing boil), strawberries need a little persuasion to form anything like a gel.

You could, of course, get a bottle of Sure-Jel or a packet of powdered pectin and make perfectly bounceable strawberry jam every time. I never do. There's nothing wrong with packaged pectin; it's a natural product, usually derived from apples or lemons. But a fruit mixture gels when the pectin is exposed to a particular ratio of sugar to acid. When you bump up the amount of pectin in the mix, you have to add a correspondingly large amount of sugar to make the science work. You'll get a firm set, but the resulting jam will be, to my taste, unremittingly sweet.

Anyway, there's no need. In my experience, you can make jam from just about anything using nothing more than fruit, sugar, and a lemon or two. Simple, easy, and spontaneous, depending on what's ripe in your backyard, your neighbor's yard or at the market.

So, back to our little diva princess, the strawberry. Her real friends are the best and oldest ones: sugar and time. But let me introduce her newest BFF, tart to her sweet, rosy pink to her ruby red. Yes, I'm talking about rhubarb, the prettiest pink stalk you ever did see. It's a perennial plant, growing from a crown and sending up long, celery-like stalks every spring that start out green and flush pink-red as the weather warms. The broad leaves look like spinach, but are mildly toxic and should never be eaten.

Sometimes called pie plant, rhubarb is one of the happiest harbingers of spring, arriving just as the first strawberries begin to appear in the market, a welcome tang of fruity pink at a time when the delights of local cherries and apricots are still a good month away. You can match rhubarb with strawberry in any ratio: a lot of rhubarb with just a few berries for sweetness, or plenty of strawberries with just a little rhubarb for texture and tartness. Which reminds me: if you've never had rhubarb before, you won't forget your first taste of it raw. Like sorrel, another lively spring arrival, it's tongue-twistingly sour.

Crunchy-firm when raw, rhubarb collapses when cooked into what can only be described as a lush stringiness. The easiest way to cook it is as a simple compote: chopped rhubarb tossed with sugar, left to sit for 15 minutes or so, then gently simmered until tender. If you're adding strawberries, just toss them into the rhubarb off the heat and let them soften in the residual warmth. It's good hot, cold, by itself, spooned over ice cream or mixed into yogurt.

After years of loving strawberry-rhubarb compote every spring, it seemed only natural to try adding some to my strawberry preserves. This would thicken up the runniness that these preserves can be heir to, while adding a dimension of fruity tartness.

For the first step, you'll need to macerate the strawberries in sugar for anywhere from 4 to 8 hours, i.e., overnight. You nip off the green hulls and cut up the berries--halves if small, quarters or smaller if large--and put them in a large glass or ceramic bowl. Sprinkle on the sugar, mix gently, cover and walk away. If it's very hot where you are, put them in the fridge, but otherwise, room temp is fine. Every couple of hours, if you think of it, give them a gentle stir to make sure the sugar is dissolving evenly.

By morning, the sugar will have draw out much of the liquid trapped inside the berries, and you'll have some slightly shrunken-looking berries floating in a lot of cough-syrup-red liquid. Add the juice of a lemon and the chopped rhubarb, then dump the whole thing into a non-aluminum pot. Bring to a simmer and let cook for 2 or 3 minutes, then pour back to the big bowl.

Cover again, this time with a clean dish towel so steam can escape, and let sit for another 4 to 6 hours. Look again, and you'll see some now majorly shrunken berries and cubes of rhubarb bobbing in even more, now slightly darker, red liquid. You're getting close now!

Now, here's the trick, and credit goes to the sublime Helen Witty, whose books Fancy Pantry and Good Stuff (now both out of print, but available at amazon.com or the library) are infallible resources for all kinds of pantry-stocking recipes.

So, put a colander over a large, preferably wide and short (rather than narrow and tall) non-aluminum pot. Dump in your strawberry mixture and let all the liquid drain into the pot. Set the fruit-filled colander aside, and bring the liquid to a boil. Let it boil vigorously for some 10 to 15 minutes, until the liquid has darkened and thickened to a syrupy consistency.

By subjecting the liquid, not the fruit, to the bulk of the boiling, the fruit stays fresh and vivid. Once the liquid has thickened, add the fruit and cook, stirring frequently, for another 3 to 5 minutes, until mixture has thickened and looks like jam. It's that simple, really.

Good as they are on toast, these preserves also make a wonderful addition to French toast. Take a thick slice of challah bread and cut a pocket into the side. Beat cream cheese until fluffy, adding honey and vanilla extract to taste. Spread a spoonful of cream cheese and a spoonful of preserves inside the pocket, then dip in a mixture of egg and milk. Fry in butter over medium heat until golden brown and gently puffed on each side. Serve with maple syrup or powdered sugar.

Photo by Stephane von Stephane

Strawberry Rhubarb Preserves

Makes 4 to 5 half-pint jars

Ingredients:
4 pint boxes strawberries, rinsed, hulled, and halved or quartered
2 to 2 1/2 cups sugar
1 lb rhubarb, trimmed and chopped
1 lemon, juiced

Preparation:

1. In a large ceramic or glass bowl, toss berries with sugar. Cover and let rest, stirring occasionally, for 4 to 8 hours.

2. Add chopped rhubarb and juice of 1 lemon to strawberry mixture. Pour into a large, shallow non-reactive pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Pour back into bowl, cover with a clean dishtowel and let rest for another 4 hours or so.

3. Set a colander over the same pot. Pour strawberry mixture into colander and let drain. Remove colander and set aside.

4. Bring liquid to a boil and let boil, stirring occasionally, for 10-15 minutes, or until liquid has thickened to a syrupy consistency.

5. Add fruit, reduce heat, and cook, stirring frequently, until fruit looks glossy and translucent and mixture has thickened to a softly jammy consistency, about 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

6. Spoon into sterilized canning jars and top with two-part canning lids. Place filled, sealed jars into a pot of boiling water to cover, and let simmer for 8 minutes. Remove jars and let cool undisturbed. Check for seals and store in a cool, dry place. Or, spoon preserves into clean, empty jars and top with lids. Let cool at room temperature, then refrigerate for up to 1 month.

Rhubarb. I have loved it for years. And why not? It's a tart, refreshing, and completely extraordinary thing when handled properly.

Of course, it is also highly seasonal. It's one of the first bits of produce to show up in markets when the ground warms up in the spring, it hangs around in the summertime, when the living is supposedly easy, but it has a predictable habit of disappearing when the weather gets rough. It's a fair weather thing. And, though most commonly lumped together with fruits, it is, in fact a vegetable-- a truth I've found very difficult to grasp over the past few years.

When you slow down long enough to really notice the word, when you break it down into its two syllables and sound it out, it just seems like a really bad idea. "Rue," as a noun connotes sorrow. As a verb, it means to regret. And barb? It can mean any sharp protrusion that points backward, like a hook or an arrow. It is something that prevents easy extraction. When you put the two pieces of the word together, however, it evokes freshly baked pies and springtime. Or, of course, it can conjure up some sad, sorrowful thing that pulls you in and won't let you go. Take your pick. I have been historically attracted to both, but that is one for my therapist. I can just see the silhouettes of the Electric Company's Oscar-winning duo, Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno, sounding it all out for me. Rhu. Barb. Rhubarb. They make it sound like so much fun.

The Latin name for the plant, Rheum rhabarbarum, should give one pause. At its base is barbarum, which indicates that the plant was, for the Greeks and Romans at least, from some place other. In the case of the rhubarb plant, this place was the Volga river-- an area at the time populated by what the "civilized" Mediterraneans considered barbarian: bearded and coarse, with a language totally incomprehensible to their own.

And Rheum? From the Latin rheuma, it means "a watery discharge from the mucous membranes, especially the eyes and nose." Charming.

The Greek word bárbaros, by the way, refers to the sound of random, incomprehensible noises one hears when listening to a language one cannot understand. The sound they made to mimic this was "bar bar." The terms "babble" and "blah blah," may be derived from this. One usage of the word "rhubarb" certainly is-- it is one of the words chosen by stage actors to chatter repeatedly in order to provide indecipherable background noise in crowd or party scenes.

Only the stalk of the rhubarb plant is edible. The green leaves of the plant-- the part of the organism from which it derives its strength and energy-- are toxic, containing the nephrotoxin oxalic acid. When eaten in quantity or over a long period of time, one may suffer kidney damage. The roots that give the plant its stability are rich in anthraquinones like emodin and rhein, which are natural laxatives and cathartics.

Well, I've had about enough catharsis, thank you very much. I no longer see rhubarb through the rosy-hued glasses that bare a remarkable resemblance to the color of the stalk itself. With the exception of the following recipe, I'm not giving rhubarb much thought anymore. Instead, I shall focus my energy and attention elsewhere. Like going to Paris for a week-- a place where the only rue-ing I'll be doing is wandering the streets of that city and the only barbs I will encounter are the bons mots flung by a couple of charming and very clever friends.

Now that's the kind of rhubarb I can really get behind.

Rapaperikiisseli (Finnish Rhubarb Soup)

And why not Rapaperikiisseli? It is a word I do not understand and could never hope to pronounce. It's all bar bar to me. I've simplified the dish somewhat, omitting the need for cornstarch. It is, in a real sense, rhubarb boiled down to its essence, with just a little help from its good friends Mr. Sugar, Señor Water, and a couple of spicy numbers from down the street. It requires little in the way of time and effort, and even less in terms of thought, which is pretty much what I should have been giving rhubarb all along.

Enjoy.

Serves: 2 to 4, depending.

Ingredients:
2 cups cold water
2 cups rhubarb, chopped and peeled (reserve the peel for use, please)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cinnamon stick, whole
a pinch of ground clove
mint, if you like, for garnish (I am not one of those people who garnishes everything with mint. It just happens to work nicely in this particular case.

Preparation:
1. In a medium-sized saucepan equipped with a lid (for future use), place water and rhubarb peel. Bring to a simmer and cook the peel until the color has been leached out. Remove and discard peel.

2. Add to the now-pink water the sugar, chopped rhubarb, and cinnamon stick. Stir, bring to a simmer, and cover. Simmer until the rhubarb falls completely apart. In my experience, it will do this with some regularity over the span of a few years. In the case of this recipe, however, give it 15 minutes. Remove the cinnamon stick and let cool enough so that, when put in a blender, the top will not burst off and scald you with hot liquid.

3. When the rhubarb is blender-ready... ummm... blend. Continue to do so until it is of a smooth, even consistency. Set to chill in the refrigerator.

4. Serve chilled in appropriate serving bowls with bits of torn mint thrown over the top. Or add little fluffy clouds of whipped cream or a dollop of crème fraîche. Your choice. The rhubarb is yours to do with as you please.