Rhubarb in the pink - Telegraph Just as they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother (according to Ira Gershwin) when they said that man could fly, so they laughed at Joseph Myatt in 1820 when he tried to sell sticks of rhubarb at Borough Market. Until then it was sold dried as a laxative medicine. Thirty years later, 9,120 dozen bundles were sold annually in the streets of London alone. We have become proud of our rhubarb, especially that grown within the sacred West Yorkshire rhubarb triangle. But now its fresh and rufous glory is threatened by the sore lack of frost in those parts. Frost, we are told, is essential to the provocation of rhubarb roots to send out sprouts for forcing in candle-lit sheds. Even so, growers have coaxed the fruity vegetable into the pink of health and soon in many a greengrocer's the joyful cry will go up: la rhubarbe nouvelle est arrivée. We'll have the last laugh, so stand ready with the custard.