New England Public Radio

Spring has arrived. The days are warming up. The Red Sox, however mediocre, are back at it. Around these seemingly separate events, commentator Robert Cox has a theory: baseball causes global warming. Cox — an historian, geologist, lover of pie, head of special collections at UMass Amherst, author of the book “New England Pie: History Under a Crust” — says he has the evidence.

Each year, the natural experiment called spring training is replayed, coinciding with a time when New Englanders are losing their will over whether winter will ever end and whether we will need to readjust expectations for outerwear or inner peace. The results are always the same: warm weather erupts in Florida, and as baseball swings northward into the frozen lands, the warmth spreads with it until sometime in April, when Red Sox fans divest themselves of just enough coats and mittens to enter Fenway Park unfettered. Springtime here is more than just a change of weather. It is a change of mindset and mood.

Before refrigeration changed the world of eating, the arrival of fresh foods after a winter of produce pickled, canned, and dried was something to cheer, a beacon for better times. When it [came] to pie, the red stalks of rhubarb were the surest signs of spring. Pushing through to the sun as the last snows depart, rhubarb reanimated the world. In the garden it was visual relief, its deep green leaves defying dulled earth and seasonal slush. In the kitchen, it was a wonder, while the weather gathered nerve to warm itself. Years before Boston’s fens became a ball park, April was the time when hearty meat pies ceded their privileged shelf in the winter oven to the fresh hope of rhubarb. Other fruits waited on deck.

Like so many favorites of New England cuisine, rhubarb was an immigrant. Early Americans thought of it as an import from exotic Tartary, a region sprawling from China to the Ukraine. From ancient times, it was revered for the medicinal value of its roots, which were a purgative and laxative. These virtues did little to encourage thoughts of pie.

But once it arrived on American shores, helped along by Ben Franklin, it became an American project. After 1800, a group of partisan botanists including Benjamin Smith Barton and Bernard M’Mahon waged a campaign to build an American national science that could surpass Europe’ arguing that the diversity of our climate, population, and flora were innate advantages. Theirs was a reverse colonialism, exploiting our native plants, yes, but importing the best of the Old World too to add to our national bounty. This campaign formed the backdrop of New England’s rising love for the pie of spring.

In more recent Aprils, with the Red Sox and patches of snow still cowering in the north shade of the barn, my friend Rachel bakes rhubarb pie to chase away the day. This is no delicate operation—ridding the stalks of toxic leaves and choking fibers, dicing them rough, and tossing them into a crust with enough sugar to feed a continent of reawakened ants. It is the product of two centuries of culinary history and a moment of perfection in the looming time of spring. The reawakening of our baseball souls.

Read more from Robert Cox’ book “New England Pie: History Under a Crust”