Worth a Journey: the Meyer Lemon and Key Lime!

Copyright © 1997 Tarla Fallgatter. All rights reserved.

The familiar, bright-yellow fruit with its sharp-tasting juices only reached the Mediterranean from Northern India toward the end of the 1st century A.D. Thus the fruit, which can reasonably be regarded as the most important for European cookery, was a comparatively late arrival. It was the Arabs who spread lemon cultivation in the Mediterranean region, especially Sicily and Spain and part of North Africa, and it was in the Near East that the lemon's wide range of culinary uses was explored.

Once the lemon had reached the New World in 1493, it spread rapidly. Since 1950, California has produced more lemons than all of Europe combined. In Southern California they are harvested all year; however, the best and cheapest lemons are available from December to March.

The Citrus limon (or so it's called in Latin) grows on a large and handsome evergreen tree that thrives in warm, dry climates. Since it can be trimmed into a decorative hedge, it is in demand as a yard tree in the Sun Belt. The flowers are fragrant and attractively tinged with purple.

The main commercial lemon variety grown in the United States is the Eureka. Other varieties to be found in the stores are the Villafranca and the Lisbon, which are grown mainly in Florida. The Ponderosa lemon, a large, thick-skinned variety that is a recent hybrid between a lemon and citron, is also found in the market occasionally. More delicious than any of these is the Meyer lemon, a sweet juicy fruit with a thin, smooth skin. Some botanists believe that the Meyer, which originated in China, is not a true lemon but a cross between a lemon and an orange. Meyer lemons are the most popular variety for home growing in California.

The popularity of the lemon as food is due to the combination of flavors in the juice, with sourness predominating. The lemon's sourness derives mainly from its citric acid content. The human palate can distinguish between only three flavors: sweet, salty and sour. The rest are actually smelled rather than tasted. Sourness is therefore a keynote of good cooking. Before citrus fruits were widely known in Europe, sourness was produced from other sour fruits, all of whose juices were called verjuice. In Northern Europe crabapple juice was used; in France and Southern Europe the flavor came from sour grape juice. But these were quickly supplanted by lemon juice, which provided sourness combined with fragrance and flavor, as soon as lemons became widely available.

The juice, rind (or zest), and even the pith and seeds of the lemon contain a variety of valuable ingredients. Lemon juice contains more ascorbic acid (vitamin C) than the juice of any other citrus fruit, warding off scurvy and other diseases. The lemon's sourness is a basic and versatile flavoring for countless sweet and savory dishes. It seems to inhibit the absorption of fats. A gentle squeeze heightens the flavor of other foods so that we don't miss the salt.

Lemon juice slows the discoloration of cut fruits and vegetables such as apples, avocados, and artichokes. It lightens the color of mushrooms in cooking, and in seafood marinades, the acid "cooks" the flesh without heat. When we forget to buy buttermilk, a few drops of lemon juice in regular milk sour it within minutes. When our hands are stained from slicing fruit or smelly from preparing fish, a cut lemon rubbed over them bleaches and deodorizes.

Lemon juice is used in salad dressings and emulsion sauces, such as hollandaise, mayonnaise, beurre blanc when used instead of vinegar and for the national sauce of Greece, avgolemono. Lemon also has a special affinity for fish. The tangy peel gives a lift to stuffings, cakes and syrups.

Lemon meringue pie, lemon soufflé and syllabub are classic desserts. Lemon curd is a traditional English preserve, while spicy pickled lemons from the East are delicious served with cold meat; the Italian gremolata, made of finely chopped lemon peel, garlic and parsley is an effective foil with osso buco, veal dishes and fish.

The outer yellow zest of the skin contains essential oil, concentrating its lemony flavor and adding the element of scent. The peel is not only a flavoring and a stimulant of the appetite, but also an antibacterial because of its content in essential oil, so that it is considered a medicinal plant. Inside, the white pith is bitter in taste, but rich in the pectin (as are the seeds) that makes jams gel.

Do not discard the squeezed-out fruit. Rub it over copper pans and basins with a little coarse salt to shine them up or press them into your garbage disposal for a clean scent.

The best lemons are heavy for their size, indicating juiciness, with finely textured, thin skins. Lemons with coarse, thick rinds and large pores should be left behind along with those that are shriveled, soft, spongy or hard-skinned.

Refrigerated, the lemon will keep a month or more. Since the aromatic zest intensifies lemon flavor in cooking, add it whenever you can. Remove only the outer colored layer, avoiding the white pith, with a zester, vegetable peeler, or fine grater before squeezing the juice. To get the most juice out of a lemon (almost 1/4C for a medium-size lemon), drop the whole fruit into hot water for a few minutes or microwave for a few seconds before cutting and squeezing or, far simpler, roll it back and forth on the counter a few times while pressing on the lemon, to help the juices flow.

Lemon grass is the reason a Thai or Vietnamese dish often will have a compelling balmlike flavor that you can't quite put your finger on. It's not exactly lemon, but more of a subtle lemon perfume. Fresh lemon grass is sold by the stalk, looks something like a scallion and is fibrous to the point of being woody. Only the bulblike 6- to 8-inch base of the stalk is used, after the top is trimmed and a layer of tough outer leaves is peeled off.

Although limes strongly resemble lemons in appearance, degree of acidity and even color, botanists have classified them as a different species: Citrus aurantifolia. Apart from the botanical differences, such as size, color and clustering of the blossoms, limes are more sensitive to the cold then lemons; they require warmth year-round. In the United States limes can be grown only in the southernmost areas of California and Florida, and large quantities must be imported from Mexico to satisfy demand.

Limes were brought westward by the Arabs, who planted sweet and sour limes in the warmest parts of the Moorish empire, in southern Iraq, in southern Persia and in Palestine. In fact the name lime comes from the Arabic word limah (as does lemon). Columbus included limes among the citrus fruits he brought to Hispaniola (now Haiti) on his second voyage in 1493, and they quickly established themselves in the warm, moist climate of the Caribbean. The first Spanish settlers in Florida brought limes with them. The trees flourished in the Keys, hence the name Key lime.

The Florida Keys are a wilderness of flowering jungles and shimmering seas. It is a beautiful drive once you arrive at Key Largo and meander your way down U.S. 1 along the islands. The Keys extend East to West from the mainland and at some points, the ocean and the Gulf are as far as 10 miles apart. The Keys' tropical climate and their proximity to Cuba and other Caribbean islands influence restaurant menus, the rum-based fruit beverages and even many restaurant's music. The better American and Cuban restaurants serve imaginative and tantalizing fusion cuisine that draws on food traditions from all over the world; Flordia citrus, seafood and tropical fruits are used abundantly.

Also known as the West Indian or Mexican lime, the Key lime is a smallish fruit whose rind remains greenish yellow even at maturity; the flesh is also green. This was the lime with which the British Navy supplied its sailors as protection against scurvy, and which hence earned the British the nickname "limey." Although it was known even in the eighteenth century that lemon juice is more effective in combating scurvy-it is twice as rich in vitamin C as lime juice-limes, unlike lemons, did not have to be bought from the foreign (and often hostile) Mediterranean countries. The sailors drank their lime juice with the rum ration and naval officers stood by to see that both juice and rum were drunk as soon as they were issued.

The fragrance of lime juice and lime rind, combined with their sour flavor and strong acidity, make them irreplaceable in cooking and perfume manufacture. The influx of new ethnic groups from the Caribbean, Mexico and Asian has brought new interest in many dishes which use the cooling lime with chiles, ginger, cumin, coriander and other spicy seasonings. In hot weather especially, the fragrance of a squeeze of fresh juice and grating of zest perfectly sets off tropical fruits such as melon, papaya and mango.

A medium-size lime contains 20 calories, half as much vitamin C as a lemon, and about three scant tablespoons of fresh juice. Four to five limes will yield about 1/2C of juice, but yields can vary. To get as much juice as possible from a lime, roll it back and forth on a flat surface under the fingers and palm of your hand before squeezing just as you would for a lemon.