Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1884 — Pieplant. [ARTICLE]

Pieplant.

There is a plant called rheum rhaponticum, that grows green and rank in the market garden. It is the joy of the average boarding-house keeper, and the loathing of her guest. Its sickly fibrous stem, inclosed in sad and sallow crust, is a substitute for Charlotte Russe and pumpkin pie. Let infamy cling to the name of the fellow that in an evil hour first called it pieplant. It is one of the cheap luxuries with which genteel poverty regales itself. It is a thoroughly plebeian weed; all they that grow, and buy and sell, and cook and serve it, are like unto it; so are all they that trust in it. Blessed be the end-man, with visage smeared and black, who, to the rattle of bones and tambourine, pours the most piquant sauce of scorning on the insipid stuff; and whoever makes two of its ungainly leaf-stalks grow where only one had grown before, let him be cursed in his hair and toe-nails —in his basket and his store.— Carl Frelzel’ti Weekly.