More Sugar, Please!

When I was a child, of all the things the grown-ups ate, two were completely incomprehensible to me: red wine and rhubarb, sour-tasting things that did not even try to please but instead filled your mouth with a nasty, numb dryness. Rhubarb was the worst, since that was the one I was subjected to—every year, as summer approached, I would watch the reddish stalks grow with furious energy, dreading the day the grown-ups would discover them and decide to make a terrible acidic rhubarb soup, almost without sugar, cooked for hours until the rhubarb had disintegrated into a thick pulp.