When I informed The Husband that I was going to make pork with a rhubarb sauce, he dismissed the idea out of hand. He does not like sweet in his savory.
I tried to explain (as I have a thousand times before) that there’s a good reason why any number of classic dishes team up meat and fruit, including duck a l’orange, foie gras with apples, and pork with prunes. Fruit contains acid as well as sugar, and acid has a winning way of cutting through the fatty richness of duck, pork and brisket.
The Husband wasn’t buying it. He’ll eat his roast duck with a peppercorn sauce, his pork with French mustard, and his foie gras without accompaniment of any kind, thank you.
I could have added that rhubarb is a vegetable, not a fruit, and that it’s so tart (not sweet) it’s rarely present in a recipe without some kind of sugar added for balance. But I would have been banging my head against a wall. So I rocked on regardless because I love rhubarb.