Rhubarb butter

I love cooking things that grow in my yard or in my neighborhood. But even more, I love canning what I cook and enjoying it far out of season.

Every year, when the apple trees along the road on which I live grow heavy with fruit, I harvest bags of apples to make butter and molasses. For the last few years, I have experimented by adding wine and spices, thinking that whatever could be mulled would be delicious in apple butter. The experiments have paid off. Throughout the winter and spring, I spread thick apple butter on toast or mix it with butter and chopped walnuts to put on waffles or French toast.

Though it’s not apple season yet, it is, however, rhubarb season. Though most harvest rhubarb only in late spring, it can be harvested judiciously all summer if you don’t let the plants flower.

Years ago, a former colleague, Sue Jellison, graciously gave me rhubarb plants, and though I have used those red and green stalks to make cranberry-rhubarb jam for a few years, this summer, I decided to experiment. While the rhubarb molasses didn’t turn out well, the rhubarb syrup did, but the real joy was tasting my first batch of rhubarb butter.

Rhubarb buttter and warm double-cream cheese.

As one might expect, it takes a fair amount of sugar to sweeten it up, but the result of combining rhubarb, sugar, cinnamon, heat and time is a thick, sweet-tangy spread that is delicious on toast, with cheese, or even as a substitute for the traditional sweet-tangy accompaniment to egg rolls, duck sauce. Try mixing it with a little maple syrup and butter to put on pancakes.

Rhubarb Butter

Makes 4 cups

6 cups chopped rhubarb stalks

3 cups sugar

½ tbl. ground cinnamon

Stir the chopped rhubarb stalks – the leaves are toxic – and the sugar in a pot. Let it sit till the sugar is wet with moisture from the fruit. This might take 20 minutes. If the fruit doesn’t yield much moisture, add ½ cup of water. Bring the fruit and sugar to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. Remove the pot from the heat and add the cinnamon. Other spices could be added to taste, ½ tsp. of dried ginger perhaps, or any other spice associated with rhubarb pie.

Pour the mixture into a slow cooker. Heat it on high for about an hour with the cover ajar to let moisture escape. High heat at first speeds up the reduction process when the mixture is wettest and least likely to burn, but it could be started on low.

Scrape the sides and stir the mixture with a rubber spatula. Using an immersion blender, process the mixture in the slow cooker till there are no more chunks. Reduce the heat to low and cook the sauce with the cover ajar till the volume of the mixture is reduced by one-third or one-half, scraping and stirring occasionally. I prefer it thicker, so reduced mine by one-half. Depending on your slow cooker, this could take from a few hours to several. Test the sauce for taste and thickness occasionally, keeping in mind that it will thicken as it cools.

Store the rhubarb butter in clean jars in the refrigerator or process it as you would jam in a hot water bath.