Rhubarb Fool

Forced rhubarb is one of the best things about the long tail of winter. It turns up at the market in January, still tender and almost luminous, grown by candlelight in dark sheds in Yorkshire and pulled before it's ever seen the sun. Long pink stems the colour of a child's painting. You can smell it from the other side of the stall.

A fool is what you make with it when you want dessert without much in the way of effort. You stew the rhubarb gently with sugar and a strip of orange peel, let it slump into a vivid pink puree, and fold it through cold whipped cream. That's the whole thing. The cream softens the sharpness, the rhubarb cuts the richness, and the two of them together taste like nothing else in the British calendar. Pink and white, marbled in a glass.

The trick, if there is one, is not to overmix. You want distinct ribbons of fruit running through the cream, not a uniform pink mousse. Fold twice, maybe three times, then stop. A fool that's been stirred into submission has lost the plot. This is a dessert that should look, in the glass, like it couldn't quite decide what it wanted to be.

I wrote it down in the notebook the first time I made it with proper forced rhubarb: "February. Cold outside. Pink in a glass. Enough." Still true.