Rhubarb sheds its image as a sugar-swathed pie plant to find its place in appetizers, salads, side dishes, entrées, and more—while also remaining one of the best desserts around.

The 200 recipes in this cookbook include desserts, of course, but also rhubarb used raw or unsweetend in meat dishes, appetizers, soups, beverages. Even those who won't or can't eat sugar will find unsweetened recipes in this book. The introduction gives a new way to quick-cook rhubarb, preserving its texture, plus historical facts, & hints for growing & preparing rhubarb.

An Asian plant with mysterious cathartic powers, medicinal rhubarb spurred European trade expeditions and obsessive scientific inquiry from the Renaissance until the twentieth century. Rarely, however, had there been a plant that so thoroughly frustrated Europeans' efforts to acquire it and to master its special botanical and chemical properties. Here Clifford Foust presents the remarkable efforts of the explorers, traders, botanists, gardeners, physicians, and pharmacists who tried to adapt rhubarb for convenient use in Europe. His is an intriguing tale of how humans and their institutions have been affected by natural realities they do not entirely comprehend. Readers interested in the history of medicine, pharmaceutics, botany, or horticulture will be fascinated by this once-perplexing plant: highly valued by physicians for its cathartic properties, rhubarb resisted revealing its active chemical principles, had many widely varying species, and did not breed true by seed. This history includes sections on the geographic and economic importance of rhubarb--which explain how the plant became a major state monopoly for Russia and an important commodity for the East India companies--and a discussion of rhubarb's emergence as an international culinary craze during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This comprehensive anthology collects together primary texts and documents relevant to the literature, culture, and intellectual life in England between 1550 and 1660.

A study of the Speziale al Giglio apothecary shop in fifteenth-century Florence, Italy.

“A remarkable story that moves from nineteenth-century England to today’s global ecological concerns around fast fashion.” —Times Literary Supplement Starting in the early 1800s, shoddy was the name given to a new material made from reclaimed wool, and to one of the earliest forms of industrial recycling. Old rags and leftover fabric clippings were ground to bits by a machine known as “the devil” and then reused. Usually undisclosed, shoddy—also known as reworked wool—became suit jackets, army blankets, mattress stuffing, and much more. Shoddy is the afterlife of rags. And Shoddy, the book, reveals hidden worlds of textile intrigue. Hanna Rose Shell takes us on a journey from Haiti to the “shoddy towns” of West Yorkshire in England, to the United States, back in time to the British cholera epidemics and the American Civil War, and into agricultural fields, textile labs, and rag-shredding factories. The narrative is both literary and historical, drawing on an extraordinary range of sources from court cases to military uniforms, mattress labels to medical textbooks, political cartoons to high art, and bringing richly drawn characters and unexpected objects to life. Along the way, shoddy becomes equally an evocative object and a portal into another world. Shell exposes an interwoven tale of industrial espionage, political infighting, scientific inquiry, ethnic prejudices, and war profiteering, and shows how, over the past century, the shredding “devil” has moved from wool to synthetics such as nylon stockings and Kevlar. The use of the term “virgin” wool emerged as an effort by the wool industry to counter shoddy’s appeal: to make shoddy seem . . . well, shoddy. Over time, the word would become a synonym for “inferior” and describe a host of personal, ethical, commercial, and societal failings. And yet, there was always, within shoddy, the alluring concept of regeneration—of what we today think of as conscious clothing, eco-fashion, or sustainable textiles. “In a brilliantly quixotic, scholarly rich, fabulously illustrated trek, Shell guides readers through the history of the reprocessing of used clothing and textiles, reflecting on human ornament, fears of contagion (think of the associations of ‘shoddy’ versus ‘virgin’ wool), and the evolution of a vast industry.” —Harvard Magazine “The fascinating story of how a respectable textile product became synonymous with all things inferior . . . . a fun ride.” —Washington Independent Review of Books