Rhubarb Cups are a simple, three-ingredient, make-ahead dessert from the 1847 cookbook The Lady’s Receipt Book by Eliza Leslie. Rhubarb Cups would be a perfect dish to add to your recipe rotation if you’ve got a freezer full of stewed rhubarb! I have to admit, they don’t end up being the most visually appealing dessert, but what they lack in aesthetics, they make up for in taste.

The cups themselves are very mild, but this recipe also includes a zippy and flavourful butter, sugar and lemon hard sauce. As an added bonus, in this blog post you’ll find out where you can find rhubarb growing wild in Banff National Park.

One evening recently, I found myself driving home from visiting my Mom with a small harvest of fresh rhubarb from her garden in the passenger seat. Basically as soon as I set foot in my door, I searched for a historic rhubarb recipe that wasn’t Rhubarb Jam, Stewed Rhubarb or Rhubarb Pie (the things I do for fun!). Rhubarb and Banana Fool, from the 1900 cookbook Mrs. Beeton’s Cold Sweets, was the most intriguing to me. A good description of this recipe in today’s terms would be a low-sugar banana and rhubarb smoothie, with a suggested whipped cream topping.

This recipe got me to start thinking about a few things: what immediately sprang to mind was one of my Father-in-Law’s favourite stories to tell first time he ate a banana in the 1950s. It’s a funny tale, so be sure to keep reading for a chuckle.

Discovering the Rhubarb and Banana Fool recipe also made me wonder: “When did people start eating bananas in North America?”, so I delve into answering that question by having a look at American and Canadian cookbooks.

You’ll also find a bit of bonus info about Cochineal, an insect used as a red dye. At the end, I briefly run over the beginnings of the banana growing industry in the Americas, and the grave injustice of the more-delicious Gros Michel banana becoming almost wiped out by disease, to be replaced by our less-tasty Cavendish bananas that we eat today.