Professor Butter Beard and Paul Cézanne’s Drawings
“The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.” – Paul Cézanne
I feel as if I should devote an entire recipe sketchbook to my love for rhubarb. At any time, amid any situation, I can transport myself to the far corner of my grandmother’s garden – her “rhubarb patch.” I sit and pull a stalk to nibble, joyfully listening to my grandfather grumble about the patch “grown another three foot into my berries.” And then I can giggle, watching him simmer down as my grandmother opens the kitchen window, letting the spring breeze pick up the aromatic whisper of her latest rhubarb pie, teasing my grandfather like a teenage kiss on his weekend-stubbled cheek.
I believe I have experimented with rhubarb more than any other ingredient. Well, dark chocolate gives it a damn good run for its penny. But, I have pages and pages of notes, sketches and re-written recipes for rhubarb custard tarts, rhubarb jam, rhubarb pickles (imagine that!), cookies, pound cakes, cheesecakes, buttercreams, and, of course, pies. Lots and lots of variations of rhubarb pies. Like Joni, I have looked at rhubarb from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow, I really don’t know rhubarb at all.
“The real prodigious study to undertake is the diversity of the scene offered by nature.” – Paul Cézanne, in a letter to Émile Bernard, 1904.
This is how I attempt to understand Paul Cézanne. Best known as a painter, Cézanne produced some of his most radically original works drawing on paper. I spent much of this rainy Memorial Day weekend with “Cézanne Drawing,” MOMA’s exhibition catalogue from 2021 that brings together more than 250 rarely shown works in pencil and kaleidoscopic watercolor from across the artist’s career that reveal how investigative drawing shaped Cézanne’s transformative modern vision – his own captured impressions.
Cézanne drew almost daily on individual sheets and across the pages of numerous sketchbooks, making his studies visible, from stretching pencil-drawn lines to layered washes of watercolor that explore texture and light.
“He returned often to those subjects close at hand,” writes Jodi Hauptman, MOMA Senior Curator, “including the objects on his kitchen table, his wife and son, and clocks and lamps that adorn domestic life; hiked out into the hills to find views of his favorite Mont Sainte-Victoire or into dense forests; and envisioned narratives from his own imagination. On paper, he rendered the iconic motifs for which he is most recognized—vibrant still lifes, prismatic landscapes, and carefully choreographed bathers—with a fresh immediacy.”
Throughout his career, while painting and drawing the landscape en plein air, he examined nature’s diversity through a rigorous process that proceeded from slow, attentive observation. He would return again and again to a favorite location in the woods or his gardens, observing and documenting the play of light and nature’s whims as shared their journey with the artist.
Cézanne wrote to his son, “Here on the riverbank the motifs multiply, the same subject from a different angle provides a fascinating subject for study, and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without moving, leaning now more to the right, now more to the left.”
Maybe that is how I look at rhubarb. Now more to the right. Now more to the left. I know Cézanne’s dream-like sketches swirled within this morning’s daybreak as I opened the kitchen window just a smidge to allow in the tickling pitter-patter of the rain. I could taste the watercolors as I allowed my baker’s soul to dictate the ingredients, combining stalks of fresh ruby rhubarb, a knob of ginger, toasted almonds and allspice and the zest of an orange into a cupcake batter and then browning the butter to its most aromatic to create a perfectly silky, teasingly nutty, buttercream frosting. Another one for the books.
“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.” - Paul Cézanne
Professor Butter Beard’s Ginger Rhubarb Cupcakes
2 dozen cupcakes
Rhubarb, stalks trimmed and cut into ¼” dice to make 3 cups total
1 cup almond slices, toasted with a dash of salt and cooled
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/3 tsp baking powder
1/3 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
2 tsp dried ginger
1 ½ cups granulated sugar
Grated zest of one orange
One 1” knob of fresh ginger, grated
12 Tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature
3 large eggs, room temperature
1 tsp vanilla paste
¾ cup buttermilk
One recipe – Professor Butter Beard’s Browned Butter Buttercream - https://www.professorbutterbeard.com/recipes/professor-butter-beards-browned-butter-buttercream
1) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line your muffin trays with paper liners.
2) Lightly toast the almond slices with a dash of sea salt and set aside to cool. When cool, slightly crush them with your fingers. Dice the rhubarb and have at the ready.
3) Whisk together the flour, baking powder and soda, salt and dried ginger. Have at the ready.
4) Pour the sugar into the bowl of a standing mixer. Grate the orange and knob of ginger into the sugar. With the paddle attachment, mix on low until the sugar appears wet and the zests are equally incorporated. Add the butter and cream until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating until each is incorporated. Scrape the bowl as necessary. Beat in the vanilla paste.
5) Add the dry mixture in two batches, alternating with the buttermilk. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the crushed toasted almonds and diced rhubarb.
6) Divide the batter evenly among the two dozen lined cups. Bake roughly 25 minutes, rotating the trays halfway through, until a cake tester comes out clean. Cool the cupcakes, in the tins on a wire rack, until room temperature before topping with the Browned Butter Buttercream.
