Stalking spring's colorful bounty

Rhubarb stalks look like pink celery and taste like the tartest gooseberries. Like mysterious foraged morel mushrooms, fussy fiddleheads, and ephemeral asparagus, cooking with local rhubarb means it's spring in New England. Thankfully it's not quite as precious as the other emblematic harbingers , and the stalks are around into the summer, then again in August.

In the garden, the hardy plant can grow just about anywhere and produce stalks every spring for at least 10 years. Forced rhubarb, which is grown in the dark, usually in Dutch greenhouses, is available year - round. It's very pink and very tender. The local crop, which is often speckled with green, and comes in thin and thick stalks, is simmered or baked with sugar and served as a dessert, which is unusual for a vegetable. But this favorite, stewed with as little sugar as possible, can also accompany pork chops.

At Henrietta's Table, bakers regularly mix rhubarb with berries for their "pie of the day." The Harvard Square restaurant is known for celebrating local produce. "We have it a few times a week right now," says manager Matt Nolan . "But we'll have it even more often once the local strawberries start coming in."

Rhubarb and strawberry pie is a New England classic, and native strawberries are about to come into season. Or top a scoop of vanilla ice cream with warm rhubarb jam and your dessert is pretty in pink.

Blue Heron Farm in Lincoln supplies the tony little shop Plum Produce, in the South End with rhubarb. It costs $6 per pound there (the price at farm stands outside the city varies; it's $2.39 at Verrill Farm in Concord, $2.59 at Wilson Farms in Lexington). Plum also offers its own jam labels, including rhubarb confiture made with rhubarb, sugar, and pectin.

Verrill has been harvesting its crop of rhubarb for almost two weeks. The farm sells the stalks, along with all sorts of pies: rhubarb-raspberry, rhubarb-mixed berry, rhubarb-strawberry, rhubarb-blueberry, and, as a special order, just plain rhubarb.

Sweet as the sour plant can be, rhubarb has a place in the savory kitchen too. Its pucker can cut through the richness of fatty meats or the fishiness of oily fish. "I like to taste the tartness," says Tony Casieri, manager of Wilson Farms. "By nature , eating rhubarb is like sucking on a lemon," he says, "but usually the only place you ever see it is in a sweet pie."

Andres Grundy, sous chef at Clio, says that in his kitchen, cooks particularly like to use rhubarb in savory dishes. Right now they're serving a brand new foie gras dish with white rhubarb (peeled and cooked in acacia honey and white port), bee pollen, a lavender sabayon , and bitter strawberry jam, which has been simmered with bitter green almonds. They also have wild ivory king salmon, glazed with licorice and served with white asparagus and rhubarb poached in verjus .

Some chefs take advantage of the faded pink hue that cooked rhubarb takes on. Steven Brand of UpStairs on the Square is slow roasting salmon and serving it with white asparagus and a minty pickled rhubarb compote. "The dish is very creamy," he says, "but the rhubarb gets right through richness. I love the color, too."