Rhubarb
William Gardener describes how, since the first century A.D. rhubarb was known to the Romans as a panacea for internal ailments, and imported from China.
Rhubarb Rheum rhaponticum L., to give it its botanical name, has a culinary history that kas short and of little distinction. Some authorities set its introduction to the English table in the eighteenth century. If we follow Nicholas Culpeper, who calls R. rhaponticum ‘culinary or tart rhubarb’ - ‘A native of Scythia but grows in our gardens’, as he says - we find a mere century or so more of kitchen use. Medicinal rhubarb is another matter.
The first indisputable references in western literature date from the middle of the first century A.D. They are two in number, and they make it clear that, though rhubarb was a commodity not grown within the confines of the Roman Empire, but imported from farther east, its use was well-established, and the trade in it familiar. Dioscorides the Cilician, apparently a surgeon in one of the legions in the first half of the century, succinctly describes the root and its uses, in Book III of his De materia medica.
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