asparagus and rhubarb

"What grows together goes together"
We’ve all heard this adage…but is it the organizing principle behind the world’s cuisines or is it just a guideline?

Here in the Northeast, our growing season is just getting started…too soon for farmer’s markets, but there is some local produce beginning to show up in grocery stores. In my own garden, the only things that are harvestable in the beginning of May are some perennial herbs (chervil, mint, chives, parsley, and lovage) and a few vegetables (peas, lettuce, wild arugula that has reseeded, asparagus, rhubarb, and wintered-over leeks). The fraises de boise, or alpine strawberries, have just begun to blush, which means that with a few days of warm weather, I can head out to the patch with a bowl of cereal and enjoy breakfast al fresco.
Examining this bounty, the combinations become obvious: peas with mint, tender salads of lettuce, arugula, and herbs, asparagus with leeks and parsley… but what about the rhubarb? Certainly, rhubarb and strawberries are a classic and sound pairing, but rhubarb is in fact a perennial vegetable that grows from crowns in the form of fibrous stalks and beneath it’s bracing acidity, there is an earthy, grassy flavor. Does this sound a lot like asparagus? My thoughts exactly.

While I could find no botanical or flavor correlations aside from those already mentioned, the combination intrigued me enough to warrant some play. It was not all fun, though. My first attempt–a dish of poached scallops with a compressed sheet of thin ribbons of asparagus and rhubarb–while beautiful to look at, fell short on flavor. Trust me on this, even the dog wouldn’t eat it. But failure is never a loss when it allows you to push forward an idea. With the scallop dish, I learned that the elements of sweet and fat were necessary to unite the flavors of these two vegetables.
Enter Bouc Emissaire, a creamy and mild goat cheese from Canada. The pairing of asparagus with goat cheese is an established one, but in order to bring rhubarb into the equation and not allow it’s acidity to compete with the tang of the cheese or overwhelm the asparagus, it needed to be balanced with sugar. Texturally, I did not want the elements to contrast, but to melt together, so I chose to manipulate their texture with hydrocolloids. Seasoned asparagus juice was set with gelatin, and rhubarb juice was gently sweetened with agave nectar and set with high and low acyl gellan gum. The final flourishes were a scattering of chamomile blossoms and a madeira reduction that was rubber-stamped on the plate.

In conclusion, I think that this dish supports the wisdom of honoring seasonality when combining flavors. The proof is that I enjoyed every morsel, while my dog watched longingly.