Nigella Lawson's Rhubarb Fool

This is old fashioned, nostalgia-perfect English summer in pudding form, vanilla-scented rhubarb rippled, totally dreamy.Make sure you use the rosiest, reddest rhubarb you can: that monster stuff, dredged up almost khaki at the very end of August, will not quite do here. I don't want to anger the nation's greengrocers, but I've found Marks & Spencer's sell rhubarb that is reliably pink all the year around. And it's hardly seasonal to mention it; but of course the pinkest, purest, pucest stalks are the forced kind that fill the shops after Christmas: no matter, you will want to eat this whenever you can.

If you haven't got any vanilla sugar to hand (though you can have, just by leaving a vanilla pod or two in a jar of caster sugar for a few days, even less if you cut the pod up), use ordinary caster sugar and add a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract to the cream when you whip it. This recipe is not Simon Hopkinson's but is wholly, chest swellingly inspire by it.

I deviate sometimes from it in the summer months - actually, throughout the year, now I come to think of it - by following exactly the same rhubarb-cooking method, but instead of doing anything with it further, I serve it simply as it is, roasted to tender pinkness, to be eaten still warm with a tub of good shop-bought vanilla ice cream.

Serves 8

Vegetarian
Contains Dairy

1 kg rhubarb, trimmed and coarsely chopped
300g vanilla sugar
500ml double cream

Preheat the oven to 190°C/Gas Mark 5.
Mix the rhubarb and vanilla sugar together in an ovenproof dish. Do not add water. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the fruit is completely soft.
Drain in a colander, or sieve, and pour the juice (you should have about 500ml) into a saucepan, then heat and let bubble away until reduced by about half.
Pour into a jug and leave to cool; do not, however refrigerate as the syrup might crystallise and lose its fabulous puce clarity.
Puree the fruit until totally smooth, then cool and chill this as well.
Whip the cream in a large chilled bowl until lusciously thick but not stiff.
Carefully fold in the rhubarb puree, then some of the reduced juice, so the mixture is streaked, rather like raspberry ripple ice cream.
Put the juice in a glass jug so that people can add more, if they want, as they eat. Or frankly, you could instead use half the amount of rhubarb juice in the pan for reducing and use the remaining 250ml for adding to champagne for a fabulous, blush-pink summer drink.

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