Rhubarb tart is a tart

Tart

A tart is a baked dish consisting of a filling over a pastry base with an open top not covered with pastry. The pastry is usually shortcrust pastry; the filling may be sweet or savoury, though modern tarts are usually fruit-based, sometimes with custard....

 filled with rhubarb

Rhubarb

Rhubarb is a group of plants that belong to the genus Rheum in the family Polygonaceae. They are herbaceous perennial plants growing from short, thick rhizomes. They have large leaves that are somewhat triangular-shaped with long fleshy petioles...

.

Mrs Beeton

Mrs Beeton

Isabella Mary Beeton , universally known as Mrs Beeton, was the English author of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, and is one of the most famous cookery writers.-Background:...

's recipe for rhubarb tart required half a pound of puff pastry

Puff pastry

In baking, a puff pastry is a light, flaky, leavened pastry containing several layers of fat which is in solid state at 20 °C . In raw form, puff pastry is a dough which is spread with solid fat and repeatedly folded and rolled out and used to produce the aforementioned pastries...

, five large sticks of rhubarb and quarter of a pound of sugar with a little lemon juice

Lemon juice

The lemon fruit, from a citrus plant, provides a useful liquid when squeezed. Lemon juice, either in natural strength or concentrated, is sold as a bottled product, usually with the addition of preservatives and a small amount of lemon oil.-Uses:...

 and lemon zest to taste. This would be baked for 30 to 45 minutes and then serve five people at a cost of ninepence.

Rhubarb was used medicinally as a purgative and this caused it to have unpleasant associations. To make the dish more acceptable, rhubarb tart was sometimes renamed Spring apples in the 19th century.

In the arts

The rhubarb tart was celebrated in the radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again in which it was a running joke. Examples of this humour included the pun

Pun

The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...

, Rhubarb Tart of Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám , a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer...

) and The Rhubarb Tart Song which went:

...
A rhubarb what? A rhubarb tart!
A whatbarb tart? A rhubarb tart!
I want another slice of rhubarb tart!
...

Notable consumers

• Friedrich Ludwig Georg von Raumer
  Friedrich Ludwig Georg von Raumer
  Friedrich Ludwig Georg von Raumer was a German historian. He was the first scientific historian to popularize history in German. He traveled extensively and served in German legislative bodies.-Biography:...
  
  , who wrote in his account of England that he was a "very industrious eater of rhubarb tart".