May 29, 2018 · by Shelagh · www.medieval-recipes.com

If you visit a medieval garden in England or France any time between Spring and Summer, you will see rhubarb amongst the plants being grown. Strictly speaking, rhubarb is not a true fruit but you will usually find it in or near the fruit section of the garden.  It was grown as an ornamental plant.

The English were perhaps the first people ever to taste rhubarb. Most probably it would have been wealthy merchants and aristocrats who travelled to Europe in the mid 1350’s. In terms of royalty, that could have included King Edward III of England who reigned from 1327 to 1377. Edward was not only the King of England but he also possessed the Duchy of Aquitaine in France. With many supporters there, he often travelled to France and had French family.

In medieval 14th century Europe, rhubarb was mainly used for medicinal purposes, commonly as a laxative. So a credible scenario for its consumption in medieval, aristocratic circles might have been a day or so following an over-indulgent medieval banquet when guests were suffering the after-effects of too much meat!

Much later the Italian explorer Marco Polo found a thriving trade in the leafy vegetable in Mongolia and China in the 13th century. The explorer found the plant, known in China as the “great yellow” – perhaps because of its thick yellowish roots – in the land of the Tangut people in Mongolia and in the far north of China, west of the present-day city of Beijing. “Over all the mountains of this province rhubarb is found in great abundance, and thither merchants come to buy it, and carry it thence all over the world,” he wrote.

Rhubarb became a highly sought-after and prohibitively expensive medicine in Europe. In France, by the 1500s, the root was 10 times as expensive as cinnamon and four times as expensive as saffron. The cost was high partly because it was imported via long caravan routes from the east via Turkey and Russia.

In the 1600s, Russia saw the value in establishing a valuable monopoly over the rhubarb trade in Europe, and breaking the monopoly was punishable by death. Emma Kay, a British food historian who founded the Museum of Kitchenalia in England’s Cotswolds area, says rhubarb was smuggled into Britain from Russia by a Scottish doctor called James Mounsey, who set up a practice in Moscow in the 1700s. The doctor treated both Russian Tsar Peter the Great and Catherine, Peter’s second wife and successor.

And that’s how Rhubarb arrived in Western Europe after centuries of exclusivity in its trade.