My Lemon Obsession

Lemons kept floating into my life this week, as if intent on making me write about them. Never a difficult thing to do; lemons are one of the foods I can’t live without.

I was browsing through a bookshop when I happened upon this gorgeous book. My heart stopped: it was as if it had been written just for me.

Squeeze Me has art by one of my favorite artists, Ed Ruscha, and recipes by one of my favorite cooks, Ruthie Rogers. And it’s all about my favorite food. How could I fail to give it a home? Fifty lemon recipes. Wonderful art. Everything about this book is pure pleasure.

The next day I walked into Citarella and discovered real Sorrento lemons from Italy. If you’re accustomed to the nasty, seedy little lemons you usually find in supermarkets, you’re in for a treat. These lemons from the Amalfi coast have unwaxed peels so filled with oil they perfume your fingers each time you pick them up. Slice one open, give it a squeeze and what you have is the platonic ideal of lemons: abundant juice with perfectly balanced tartness.

Then a friend introduced me to this lemon squeezer. “The woman in the store told me this would change my life,” she said, handing me the dream farm lemon squeezer. “It folds flat so it doesn’t taking up all that space in the drawer.”

But it would take more than the ability to fold itself into a small space to impress me. As far as I’m concerned lemons - and the tools dedicated to them - are welcome to all the space they need. But this turns out to be an impressive tool: easy to use, it extracts the maximum amount of juice and filters out the seeds.

My lemon obsession goes way back. When I wrote my first cookbook, A Feastiary, in 1971, I devoted an entire chapter to lemons. Here’s the opening to that chapter.

I wrote about lemons in Comfort Me with Apples too…..

At first the thought of going to Danny Kaye’s house was thrilling. But at the last minute Michael couldn’t come; three gunman had held up a bank in Santa Monica, and he was needed at the station. As I drove through Beverly Hills, alone, looking for San Ysidro Drive, I began to have doubts. What on earth were we going to talk about?