Rhubarb Dream Dessert

There’s no way around it. This dessert is beige. It really has very little going for it from an aesthetic point of view. It doesn’t even take advantage of the natural flare of the main ingredient. Rather than leaning on the ruby intensity of the rhubarb, it cooks down to a sweet, custardy interior with the barest hint of pink per bite. But weren’t we all taught that looks can be deceiving? In this case the artifice of the beige exterior hides the most comforting, tangy sweet inside over a shortbread biscuit base. All of it is covered by a meringue adjacent topping. It’s one of my mom’s recipes and it really is a dream.

We always had rhubarb around either in the garden or in the freezer because my mom loves to cook with it. There is a quality to cooked rhubarb that can’t be replicated by anything else. You don’t often think of astringency as a sensation you want in food but when it is present, especially in relation to sugar, the combination gives you the puckering feeling of sour but the distinct flavor of sweet. It’s unique and makes rhubarb an incredible ingredient to work with.

I’ve never seen a recipe like this before and the end result is similarly unexpected. It is a little bit of a lot of things and that’s why I love it. My mom makes it in a smaller pan which would be more like an 8 inch by 8 inch pan but I like more of the whole thing and more of the biscuit crust so I double the crust which is what I’ve reflected in the recipe below. It is great on its own but if you have some vanilla ice cream around or some freshly whipped cream, it will be even better. Serve it warm from the oven for a real showstopper and, if you have any, the leftovers are great the next day.