Dissent as American as a rhubarb pie
- Erin Stephenson
- Jun 20
- 12 min read
Questions persist: Has it always been thus? What's next?
I remember this in vivid detail from my childhood:
I was 10 years old. It was early summer, May, a typically beautiful time of year in Fort Collins. I had just come in from outside.
My mother was standing at the kitchen sink, doing some dinner prep, like peeling potatoes or slicing carrots. We had a nice kitchen in that house with a big window over the sink that looked out at our expansive backyard. Sometimes when the girls around the block, whose backyard abutted ours, were making dinner or doing dishes, we could see them through that window, wave to them, and, in the summer, shout greetings through the open windows.
With a husband, four children and a constantly growing parade of pets, my mother spent a lot of time at that sink, a lot of time looking out that window at the kids, hers and the neighbors’, at the dogs, at the yard and the bushes and the flowers and the 1972 world that was familiar and safe but seemed foreign and frightening at the same time.
That day, her gaze seemed unfocused. She seemed sad, kind of teary-eyed but not crying.
The radio was on, and the voices filling the kitchen were somber. I don’t remember what they were saying. I was too surprised by my mother’s reaction to absorb anything but her.
Before she saw me standing there, I heard her say, her voice trembling, “What is happening to this country?”
When she finally noticed me, she snapped off the radio, took a deep shaky breath and finished making supper.
***
My parents were born in the nascent days of the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. My dad was 12, my mother 11 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That night, my little-girl mother lay sleepless in her bed convinced Waverly, Neb., was the enemy’s next target. It wasn’t; Waverly still stands all these years later — but in the four years that followed that infamous day, my mother watched two brothers and two brothers-in-law go off to war. By the time I was old enough to listen, the story she told was that her brother, Max, the oldest in the family and therefore the most beloved, had won the war single-handedly.
He didn’t, of course, but it didn’t hurt anyone to believe.
They all came home, heroes, but men vastly changed from the boys they had been when they left to serve their country. They all got married; they all got jobs; they all raised families in a rapidly changing world that they didn’t always understand and didn’t always welcome.
My dad, a part-time county boy most-of-the-time city boy, had a different experience. He watched the fathers and older brothers of his friends leave Indiana for war duty, but his father was too old — and too essential to their small Indiana city. My grandfather was a doctor, running a private practice in the basement of their home, often accepting eggs and apples and other farm truck in exchange for setting a broken bone or delivering a baby. He was a surgeon at the nearby hospital, the physician at the state penitentiary, and by the time the war was raging, the only (or one of the few) doctors left to serve the city of 26,000. The others, the younger ones, left to save democracy overseas. In those years, my grandfather worked around the clock, trying to fill that void. He suffered a debilitating heart attack sometime during the war; another one took his life a few years later. My dad called his father one of the uncounted casualties of WWII.
My dad later would be drafted into the Army and spend two years in uniform and not quite a year in Korea. He was 21, a new college graduate with a rising future, but when his country knocked — so to speak — he answered, never once contemplating ways to get duck the duty.
That was the world and worldview that informed my parents’ relationship with this country. They were convinced, no, they knew and never doubted that the United States were the good guys. The boys who went to war (those who came home and those who did not) told them so. The women and girls who waited at home and worked (in unprecedented numbers) for a paycheck told them so. The old men and young boys who toiled ceaselessly to keep the cities running, the farms producing, the sick recovering told them so. And my parents, still young and not too worldly, believed them.
They always believed that, all through their lives.
They weren’t ostriches though. They lived through a lot of things that would make even the most naive American question the myth: Japanese interment and the A-bomb, My Lai, McCarthyism, any number of wars and military conflicts, political upheaval, campus unrest, assassinations, school shootings. Despite how they sometimes, often, too often watched the 10 o’clock news in disbelief, they knew in their minds and in their hearts, that America wore the proverbial white hat. It was flawed, but trying.
***
But I grew up in a more politically cynical time. Watergate and Vietnam, not D-Day, were the defining political stories of my childhood.
In the file drawers of my political memory is the night in May 1970 that arsonists torched Old Main at Colorado State University in what was assumed to be an anti-war protest, or a violent response to those protests by out-of-town actors. The family who lived two houses down the street from us in Fort Collins lost their son in Vietnam; and after we moved to Colorado Springs a few years later, the little girls who lived behind us were growing up without their father, also a war casualty. I remember images of war on the TV news.
As a bored kid, I remember so much TV viewing on summer days interrupted by a panel of white men in horn-rimmed glasses, gray suits, wide ties droning on about the president’s complicity with and coverup of a political scandal I didn’t really understand. I remember dinner-table conversations about tape recordings and the Creep Committee, Deep Throat and Martha Mitchell. When Richard Nixon told the world he was resigning the presidency, I was sitting in the bar at La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe, N.M., with my aunt and sister, waiting for a table in the fancy dining room,. It was my sister’s 17th birthday. We thought then and the next day when we watched Nixon and his stoic wife board a helicopter on the White House lawn that his flying off into the sunset was the end of the turmoil.
But we were young then and optimistic and maybe selectively-informed, and of course we were wrong.
Later, when we were adults, John Lennon was shot and Ronald Reagan was shot and Alan Berg was gunned down in his Denver driveway by members of a church that still stands about 5 miles down the road from where I live now.
And the trauma, it seems, just kept on coming, like a soundtrack through the ’80s and ’90s, through the pain of 9/11 and it’s complicated fallout, the brief exhale of the Obama years, and now this.
Sometimes, now, especially now, I wonder, like my mother did, “What’s happening to this country?”
Then I wonder, has it always been this?
***
This past weekend I attended a “No Kings” protest at the university where I was an undergraduate. It’s about three miles from my house (although it was much farther away when I was a student there). It has a wide open plaza surrounded by trees, bathed in sunshine and typically teeming with the potential college students carry with them. When I was a student there, people stood on soapboxes, mostly figuratively but sort of literally, when something was bothering them, and vagabond preachers tried to save our souls. Saturday it was full to overflowing with community members and outrage.
Certainly, these days, there’s lots to be outraged about: mass firings of federal employees, random and arbitrary immigration raids, petty vendettas against cherished institutions, undermining long-trusted scientific and healthcare systems, dismantling lifesaving foreign aid programs, compromising the world economy and individuals’ financial future, plans to sell off public lands, suspension of habeas corpus, use of foreign prisons and masked, unidentified police, villainizing the press, violating Posse Comitatus, disregarding Supreme Court edicts and rolling back Constitutional rights. Plus the coarsening of the culture, the profanity, the incivility and the gratuitous cruelty.
All of those issues, or some of them, and maybe others were represented on the signs at Saturday’s demonstration.
I’ve never made one of my own, but I like the signs. I like how colorful they are, how creative, how clever. I like the ones written in little-kid script and the ones that rhyme, the ones pieced together with letters cut out of magazines and the ones fastened to the back of dogs like a sandwich board.
This time, however, I was also struck by the harsh historical references, the imagery of archaic weaponry, the call to violent retribution with the words of long-gone monarchs, either factual or fictional. I suppose, for a demonstration held on a university campus, they were appropriate and maybe clever, but I confess to finding the violence in them unsettling.
When I got home, the cable news stations were full of reports of a political assassination in Minnesota — two dead, two seriously injured, others targeted, family pet slaughtered.
Later in the day, there were tanks on the streets of Washington, D.C., a self-indulgent muscle flex by a bully bored by his own bravado.
I recognized the Mobius strip.
***
When I was trying to figure out how to wrap up this thing, I came across Joseph Fasano’s poem “For Those who Stand against Tyrants.” These lines resonated: “Come, loves, let's stand here after madness. The world is not over, only broken. …”
At times, it does feel like we are standing in madness, driven by division and dismissiveness and obdurance, digging our heels in against diverse voices and new ideas, rejecting for rejection’s sake the values and communities that have led us through our darkest times, more Watergate than D-Day.
But I reject the notion that we must remain mired in the muck of places we don’t want to be.
We are more than the sum total of our worst instincts.
America is more than its government,.
And as we know — because Edward R. Murrow told us so and our uncles and fathers proved it to us — Americans “are not descended from fearful men.”
Recently on “The Beat with Ari Melbar,” political strategist Chai Komanduri said, “America is not the past. It’s not the norms. It’s not all the great stuff we’ve done or all the horrible stuff we’ve done. America is what we do next and what we choose to do next.”
There are answers out there if we are brave enough to search. Not to the question my mother asked way back when: “What’s happening to this country?” But to even more elusive matters: “Who is America now? What future are we willing to work for? What do we do next?”
The Pie: Rhubarb
When I was a kid, living in a Colorado mountain town and later in a city in the foothills, rhubarb was a common backyard plant. Everyone grew it, some as a garden staple and others as a persistent feral plant. And if you couldn’t, or didn’t, grow your own, you could find it at summer markets and farm stands or a generous neighbor would knock on your door with an armful of stalks to give away.
But that was then.
Now it is harder to find or grow rhubarb. It’s been a couple years since I’ve seen it in the grocery store. It’s missing from the farm stands. And a couple of years ago, I tried to grow my own plant, but it quickly withered under a hot summer sun.
So now rhubarb seems like an old-fashioned delicacy.
My mom, a great baker, used to make rhubarb pie because we had those backyard plants and my dad had a serious sweet tooth. She made straight rhubarb pie, strawberry-rhubarb pie, rhubarb pie with apricot honey, rhubarb pie with a crumb topping. They were recipes she passed down to me.
I love rhubarb — maybe because of that nostalgic taste that connects me to my mother’s kitchen, maybe just because it’s tart enough to cut through the sweetness of a traditional dessert.
What I’ve learned, though, since I began cooking with rhubarb, is the green and pink stalks are more than a pie plant. You can turn it into jam or candy, syrup, ice cream, tarts. You can use it in savory dishes. It's great as a sauce with chicken or beef and adds an unexpected pop of flavor to a pot pie.
And if you can’t get past the idea that rhubarb belongs in a pie, you can still try some unusual recipes, like rhubarb custard pie, Blubarb pie and Impossible Rhubarb Pie, which is fun because it makes its own crust.
The recipes:
Rhubarb-chicken pot pie
Whole wheat pie crust, enough for 4 small pot pies (see below)
4 chicken drumsticks
4 large carrots, sliced
2 medium-sized potatoes, cut into small chunks
1 pound rhubarb, sliced into ½-inch pieces
1 large onion, chopped into small pieces
1 tablespoon grated ginger
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 garlic clove, sliced into thin pieces
1/2 teaspoon chili pepper flakes or more to taste
2 cups water
Salt
Turmeric
Prepare crusts and place bottom crust in four small pie dishes. Place in refrigerator while you prepare the stew.
Slice and fry the onion in oil.
Add sliced garlic and fry until golden.
Add chicken, grated ginger, chili flakes, salt and turmeric.
Add sliced carrots.
Add sliced rhubarb.
Add water and bring to a boil.
Reduce the temperature and let it cook for 40-60 minutes until liquid has reduced by half.
Remove bones from drumsticks and chop up meat. Return to vegetable mixture.
Place chicken stew in pie crust. Place top crust on pie; trim and crimp. Prick crust with fork or cut steam vents in crust. Place in preheated oven. Reduce heat to 350 degrees. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
WHOLE WHEAT CRUST
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1½ cup white whole wheat flour or unbleached whole wheat flour
3 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons sugar
1¼ cup (2¼ sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
6 tablespoons cold vegetable shortening
6 tablespoons cold vodka
12 tablespoons cold water, plus extra as needed
In a large bowl, stir together the flour, salt and sugar until everything is thoroughly combined. Add the butter and shortening and cut the mixture together using a pastry cutter until it forms small pea-sized crumbs coated in flour.
Pour the vodka evenly over the dry ingredients, a few tablespoons at a time, using a rubber spatula to press the dough together. Add the water, a tablespoon or two at a time, and continue to press the dough together to form a large ball. If the dough doesn’t come together or seems dry, add a little extra ice water a tablespoon at a time until everything comes together easily. (Be careful to work the dough as little as possible; otherwise the crust may be tough.)
Divide the dough into four equal balls; press each into a disk, wrap each disk in plastic wrap; and refrigerate for at least an hour or up to two days before rolling out.
Impossible Rhubarb Pie
½ cup soft salted butter
3 cups thinly sliced rhubarb
4 large eggs
1 cup milk
¾ cup sugar
½ cup flour (or a blend of ¼ cup gluten-free flour and ¼ cup white rice flour, see below)
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg (optional)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Use 1 tablespoon of butter to grease pie pan. Melt the rest of the butter and allow to cool slightly.
Thinly slice the rhubarb and spread evenly into the buttered pie pan.
Put the eggs, milk, sugar, flour, vanilla and nutmeg into bowl or blender. Add the melted butter. Blend for 1 to 2 minutes until smooth.
Pour the batter over the rhubarb in the pie pan. Push down any floating pieces of rhubarb so they are coated with batter.
Bake for 45 to 50 minutes until the top is nicely browned and evenly puffed up.
Allow the pie to cool completely before cutting. Serve at room temperature or chilled. Top with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
The pie will keep, covered, in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 days.
Tips
* Use a 9-inch deep dish pie plate or a 10-inch regular pie plate. If using a regular pie plate, you’ll have too much batter, so you can put some rhubarb and the extra batter in a small dish and bake separately. It will be done 10-15 minutes quicker than the larger pie.
* For a gluten-free pie: Use a half gluten-free flour and half white-rice flour blend for best results. All gluten-free flour will not form a crust.
Rhubarb-Red Plum Jam
4 cups coarsely chopped plums
4 cups chopped rhubarb
½ cup water or unsweetened orange juice
2 tablespoons lemon juice
4 cups granulated sugar
In a large pan, combine plums, rhubarb cut into ½-inch pieces), water and lemon juice.
Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring constantly to avoid burning or sticking.
When it has come to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low. Allow to simmer, partly covered, stirring often, for about 15 minutes or until rhubarb is tender.
Slowly pour in the sugar, stirring constantly to avoid burning and sticking. Bring mixture to a boil over high heat, stirring constantly until sugar is completely dissolved.
Reduce heat to medium. Allow mixture to simmer gently, uncovered, stirring often and reducing heat further as mixture thickens, about 20-25 minutes.
Remove from heat and skim off foam.
Ladle into sterilized jars to within ¼ inch of the top and wipe rim as necessary. Apply prepared lids and rings and tighten to fingertip-tight. Process jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.
Allow to cool on cupboard. Lids should pop as they cool.
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