Royal rhubarb

Close followers of the royal scene will know that not only do they exhibit a walled cabbage patch at Hampton Court Palace, but they also exhibit a great deal of rhubarb in the walled garden at Osborne House. So, as it is getting towards the end of the rhubarb season, we thought we ought to give it a try and took the four sticks illustrated left, sold to us for 50p a stick.

Sold to us by, I might also say, by a very nicely spoken young woman who turned out to come from Newfoundland, from a family which got there in the middle of the eighteenth century; a real Canadian. She was not too impressed with the idea that the people of Newfoundland were called Newfies, nor with that that Newfies were fond of seal meat. She also thought that Ottawa was in central Canada.

Half the rhubarb has now been cooked and turned out rather well. Not stringy despite the size of the stalks and, more or less by luck, I got the sugar right. Perhaps Whitworths is a superior brand.

I have also learned that the Whitworths who do sugar and dried fruit do not do flour, although there is a miller called Whitworths based in Wellingborough. Whereas I had assumed that they made flour as they made the cookbook which I mostly use for baking cakes and scones. Whereas their web site seems to be more or less exclusively about dried fruit, nuts and sugary snacks made from same. No sugar, never mind flour, never mind the fact that I can see a packet of Whitworths sugar with the Whitworths logo as I type.

However, google does suggest a connection between these two Whitworths. They are both based in Wellingborough and according to wikipedia the snack Whitworths was primarily a flour miller when it started up around 130 years ago. Maybe the flour part of the company did not approve of all the sugar and broke away. A good basis for the plot of a yarn from the Midsomer people.

Reference 1: http://whitworths.co.uk/.

Group search key: wwa.