Back in the nineties, when I first read Annie Somerville’s ahead-of-its-time Fields of Greens cookbook, I couldn’t understand why Meyer lemons kept popping up everywhere. Growing up on the East Coast, I’d never seen one before and felt slightly annoyed by the specificity. Lemons were lemons, weren’t they? When I moved to California and got my hands on some, I finally understood: Meyer lemons are a delicate-skinned hybrid of lemon and mandarin orange, and everything about them is tasty—skin, flesh, even pith. They give recipes a distinctive tangy, floral flavor. When I worked for a short while at Chez Panisse, we would add minced lemon skin, pith, and zest to many of our vinaigrettes, and to this day I do the same in the winter and spring, when Meyer lemons are plentiful. If you cannot get Meyer lemons in your grocery, you can use 2 teaspoons of the finely grated skin of a conventional lemon instead, but just the bright yellow skin; conventional lemons have a bitter pith.
From BON APPETIT: THE FOOD LOVER’S CLEANSE by Sara Dickerman. Copyright © 2015 by Sara Dickerman. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. —Sara Dickerman
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