Lucy Dearlove: This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove. This
month...Oranges and Lemons
Selin Kiazim: An example is that or...to...a couple of other
traditional things that we have and one is a lahmacun, which is
a thin flatbread topped with spiced lamb mince and then you
have it with a salad and a squeeze of lemon, always.
Lucy Dearlove: It's a sunny Monday lunchtime in January, and
I'm sitting at a table in Selin Kiazim's Shoreditch restaurant
Oklava. Oklava is broadly a restaurant with Turkish
influence although Selin, who's British Cypriot, would prefer
not to be pigeonholed as such.
Selin Kiazim: I always say if I like...if I didn't have to be
labelled, I'd prefer that. I just want it to be a great
restaurant. And it's...I'd just be seen as a chef who cooks good
food.
Lucy Dearlove: The restaurant isn't open, but there are chefs
busting away behind the counter getting ready for service that
evening. And whilst Selin and I are talking, she has half an eye
on proceedings; profusely apologizing before getting up to
talk the chefs through something or pull a dish out of the oven.
Selin Kiazim: When people ask me what my favourite dish is like,
from the menu and stuff, I...or in general probably in life...I
always say I probably couldn't pick one! But if I had to, it
would probably be the lahmacun and because it's like it's got,
you know, crispy bread. It's got lamb, which I love, and it's got
acid, then the salad. I love that. And it's like everything.
It's like a perfect mouthful, right? So I could eat those all
day, every day.
The question I asked myself is, you know, what is it...what
makes a really great plate of food? What makes it like so
delicious that you, you can't help but keep going back to it?
And in my head when I think about the dishes that I really
love and the things I'm like, ooh, can't get enough of that
that suit my taste buds, the three fundamental things are
acid, texture and contrast.
Lucy Dearlove: This holy trinity is the subtitle of Selin's
latest book, Three: acid, texture, and contrast.
Selin Kiazim: I think the most basic one is bringing acid with
rich things. So if you think...any sort of fat, butter,
creaminess, things like that...for me, and I think for
for most chefs as well and kind of like more advanced cooks,
it's like ingrained in you to think that needs acid. But a
home cook won't necessarily think of that. So that's a part
of the...trying to teach people that at the beginning of the
book is like this is, this is what's happening in your head
and in your mouth. And why they...and I think acid it gives
it that when you put that in, it always like makes your mouth
water and makes you keep going back for more
Lucy Dearlove: And while acid in Selin's cooking comes from all
sorts of varied and maybe even surprising sources: samphire,
tomatoes, sauerkraut, she has a special place in her heart and
her kitchen for the lemon. "This is my inheritance. Lemon is an
unmissable part of the Cypriot meal," she writes.
Selin Kiazim: I love acid, probably too much sometimes. But
like, you know, I think that stems from my mother's love of
lemons in particular. And I think that stems from the fact
that she's born and brought up in Cyprus, you know, and that's
it's quite as quite a Cypriot thing. But with kebabs which a
lot of the time...you know, families getting together,
especially in the summer months, but kind of all year round, get
round on Sunday, and they will have big spreads and whatever
and there's always lemon wedges on the, on the table. And so you
see it here, here as well with with Cypriots, I notice...it's
not so much a thing from Turkey, I've noticed is quite different,
but it's quite, it's a very Cypriot thing to have lemon
wedges and you squeeze it, whether it's your lamb shish or
like lovely grilled, kind of fatty sausages and things
Lucy Dearlove: Like the wedges of lemon serve to squeeze over
the delicious kebabs, citrus moves constantly and quietly
through the veins of this country. Not entirely
uncelebrated. Apparently our favourite cake as a nation is
lemon drizzle. But it's rarely the main attraction – instead a
supporting actor. Not just a friend to meat, it's found on
this side of battered fish and raw shellfish alike, whether in
polystyrene or silver platters. For the real elite citrus
experience you can find it dressed in a muslin jacket, to
shelter those among us who would never pick out their own pips.
You can buy all manner of contraptions to extract the
juice from it. It's neatly sliced into jewel-like wedges
and stashed in perspex containers behind bars, ready
for action. A glass of ice ready for gin and tonic or soda water
looks naked without it. It's the title of one of our most famous
nursery rhymes.
Selin Kiazim: People may not necessarily realise it, but I
think that really fresh acid that comes from lemon, I think
excites people's palates, and they don't realize what it's
doing to them, but perhaps it's like hypnotising them and making
them want more and more of it.
Lucy: I don't think Selena is exaggerating. I think we are
hypnotised by it. To me, the flavour of citrus feels
irreplaceable in the exact opposite to the way that many
fruits and vegetables feel interchangeable. The first time
I really started to think about citrus was a few years ago, when
I went to a talk on sustainability in restaurants
with the chef Marie Mitchell. Someone who works in the
sustainable drinks field talked about how their bar, which
operated with a closed loop approach, was at odds with how
many cocktail bars function – in two areas in particular: ice and
fresh fruit. He talked about how, instead of turning to
citrus as the go to sour element in many of their drinks, they
experimented with sour ingredients which could be grown
easily in this country and then juiced or otherwise processed
and preserved to reduce waste, like rhubarb.
I guess appropriately for a closed loop philosophy there's
an unexpected slightly pleasing circularity here. In Dorothy
Hartley's Food In England, she notes that before citrus was
widely available, sour notes in English food were delivered by
verjuice produced from native crab apples, or barberries, or
gooseberries, which weren't native but arrived in England in
the 1530s and grew abundantly here. It was only in the 19th
century, she said, when a squeeze of lemon fully replaced
verjuice in many dishes.
For some reason, I held a misconception for years that our
citrus consumption in this country with a very modern
addiction, like avocados, or even bananas. And it's true that
they are now more widely and cheaply available than any other
point in history. But the English obsession with citrus
fruit goes back a lot further than you might think. Just as
Selin describes how citrus perfectly cuts through fatty
meat, English cooking from the 1600s onwards was pairing lemon
when available with dishes like Hen of the Wake, boiling fowl,
ragout of pig's ears and jugged hare. Margaret Visser in her
book Much Depends on Dinner, describes how first citrus
sweets called Succade arrived in England from Spain and Portugal
not long after the Crusaders had first tasted the fruit in the
Holy Land at the end of the 12th century. And a century after
that the fruit itself was also to be found being transported
northwards. As Kate Colquhoun discusses in her book taste, by
1534, Henry VIII's household was using enough citrus in his
cooking to warrant buying an orange strainer. This could be
attributed perhaps to his first wife Katherine of Aragon's
background: the use of sour Seville orange juice in red meat
stews and pies and pairing fish and poultry with lemons. But the
Elizabethan era saw a rise in cookbooks printed for
householders, not professional cooks, and it was clear from
these that citrus had firmly entered the consciousness of
English cookery. Greater quantities were imported during
this era, and prices started to decrease slightly. The historian
Dr. John Gallagher points me in the direction of Giacomo
Castelvetro, who he describes as a 16th century Italian refugee
who spent a significant amount of time in England.
Castelvetro's book The Fruits, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy,
which was reissued in the late 80s with a foreword from Jane
Grigson, was written as a reaction to his horror about how
few vegetables English people ate. Hoping to encourage the
English to consume and grow more fruits and vegetables, in the
book he lists seasonal varieties from Italy, along with
preparation and cooking suggestions. Many of them
include a dressing made from salt and pepper, olive oil, and
bitter orange juice.
Lucy Dearlove: I wonder how he would have felt about bitter
oranges being absorbed into the historical canon of English
food, but not primarily as a dressing for homegrown seasonal
vegetables. As Helena Attlee recounts the story in her
beautiful book about citrus cultivation in Italy, The Land
Where Lemons Grow, at the beginning of the 18th century
stormy weather forced a Spanish ship laden with Sevilles to take
shelter in the harbor at Dundee, James Keiller, a local grocer,
bought the cargo at a very low price only to discover that the
oranges were sour, not sweet and he was unable to sell them
whole. His mother Janet had the idea of substituting oranges for
the quinces, she usually used to make marmalade because
traditionally, marmalade was made with quinces. The orange
marmalade proved so popular with customers of their shop that
Janet began to make it every year. And by 1797, the demand
was so great that the family opened a marmalade factory in
Dundee.
The word zest, which we now interchangeably use in English
as a noun or verb referring to the outer fragrant skin of the
citrus and removing it respectively and also as a
descriptor of someone's enthusiasm for life has been in
usage since 1670s France. First used to refer to skin or peel,
generally, and then later, more specifically to the skin of
citrus fruits, which could add flavour. As early as the 1790s
an understanding of keen enjoyment was attributed to its
meaning.
Selin Kiazim: But I think I find lemon...well, and all citrus,
actually, but they're really, they're such interesting fruits,
because the juice is so different from the zest, I find.
And I actually like, I use lemon zest in some things, but rarely,
because I find it...I can...I find it like too dominating
sometimes in certain things. And I think, I think there's a real
subtlety to how you need to, to use it.
Lucy Dearlove: So interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.
Selin Kiazim: There is right? Because especially in thing...
like with a lemon tart, right, some people arelike they're
absolute avid...bow down to the lemon tart kind of thing. And
there's very few that I've ever had that I'm like, oh, that's,
that's really delicious. And I can finish it, but I just find
it...which is strange, because I love lemons, but then I'm like
this...with that amount of sugar and stuff that goes into it. I
don't know, it just does something weird with my palate
that makes me go, ooooh I can't I can't eat too much of that.
And so often here, I don't know, there's been a dressing or
something that we make, and I'll be like, oh put, you know,
squeeze one or two lemons into it and they'll be like, zest
too? Almost every time like every chef will say to me, zest
too? And I'd be like, No. And they're always like, why? And
I'm like...they're like it's gonna make it more lemony. And
I'm like, Yeah, but in the wrong way. There's a difference.
Lucy: Wrong kind of lemony.
Selin Kiazim: Wrong kind of lemony, yeah
Nina Mingya Powles: So I wanted to write about peeling, and
about skin. I always do find myself writing about food even
if the overall project isn't necessarily food focused.
Lucy Dearlove: Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, editor and
publisher, who was born in Aotearoa New Zealand, partly
grew up in China, and now lives in London. Her book Small Bodies
of Water was published last year. It's a lyrical,
atmospheric collection of essays, which see Nina submerged
in different bodies of water all around the world, exploring
themes of movement, migration and transformation.
Nina Mingya Powles: think about fruit, I think. And the
connections that fruit brings me in particular, like I think I
really associate mandarins with my mum. I think I don't really
know anyone else who eats many mandarins. I do except my mom.
Lucy Dearlove: So tell me about your relationship with citrus.
Nina Mingya Powles: So I'm obsessed with fruit. And I can
like...like if my body could I could probably almost like
survive on fruit if my body would let me and I think
particularly at this time of year, I'm like, living off
mandarins specifically. And I think I always have...so I grew
up in New Zealand and in winter time, so June, July...those
like...mandarins are in such abundance. And then I think as I
got older, I became more aware of mandarins and also pomelo
being like really, really culturally significant,
especially at New Year's, Chinese New Year time. And like
when you visit a temple, or if you see like a family shrine at
home, there's usually like a bowl of mandarins. And I didn't
grow up with that element of like...the spiritual element of
Chinese culture really at all. But they...kind of generally
they symbolize good fortune, prosperity, particularly at New
Year, and then also they're like, offerings that you would
give. So I really like that as well.
Lucy: And so, now that you're living in London, which is a
city where you're not from, that you didn't grow up, do you feel
like there's a sense...you know, does it, does it make you
homesick? Or is there a kind of like, do you eat them to be
comforted and reminded of home?
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, definitely. I think I do. I
think it's, yeah, I think it's taken a while for me to find,
like my favorite London mandarins, but I think I think I
find them at corner shops, especially like Spanish
clementines, and they usually have the leaves attached. Oh my
gosh,
Lucy: we've just we've just come across like, a crate of pomelo.
At this point, Nina and I had just rounded the corner from
Lisle Street into Gerrard Street, the main bit of London's
Chinatown. It was late January, right before Lunar New Year, and
the streets were packed with people, lanterns and piles of
citrus in crates. Nina suggested this location for our
conversation, and it felt wildly appropriate for two reasons. The
first being of course, that citrus fruit came from China in
the first place.
As John McPhee notes in his book Oranges, the first known
reference to this fruit occurs in the second book of the Five
Classics, which appeared in China around 500 BC, and is
generally regarded as having been edited by Confucius. He
describes the fruit's journey over many 1000s of miles and
years, from its origins near the South China Sea, down into the
Malay Archipelago, and then on 4000 miles of ocean currents to
the east coast of Africa, along the desert by caravan and into
the Mediterranean basin, and then over the Atlantic to the
American continents. It sometimes exactly kept pace with
the major journeys of civilisation, he writes.
While there are now many hundreds of varieties of fruit,
there are three ancestral species in the genus citrus
associated with modern citrus cultivars: mandarin orange,
pomelo, and Citron. All are still familiar to us by these
names today. I have only ever once eaten citron, at a supper
club by the chef and writer Thom Eagle, where it was served
thinly sliced and salted. And where another guest delightfully
referred to it as a 'fatty lemon' on account of its thick
white rind. I must have eaten 1000s of mandarin oranges over
the years, despite the fact that as Helena Attlee notes, they
were the last member of the citrus genus to reach Europe.
And this is going to be my first time eating a pomelo.
Nina Mingya Powles: So these ones say red pomelo.
Lucy Dearlove: Is that the same as honey?
Nina Mingya Powles: Well these ones obviously will be pink
inside, maybe the honey one's....will not be pink
inside, I'm not sure...I think we should buy a red one.
Lucy: Okay, yeah, pink flesh...
Nina Mingya Powles: Pink class one! Shall we get one of these?
Lucy: Yeah.
Nina Mingya Powles: I'm kind of squeezing it but I don't
really...
Lucy: It's kind of hard because it's so like wrapped in plastic.
You've got the kind of layer of plastic and then...
Nina Mingya Powles: I like that this one's not giant. Some of
them are really giant.
Lucy: Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna get one of these as well.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah. So that's a pretty good price for a
pomelo, I would say, in London
Lucy: Okay, cool.
In Small Bodies of Water. Nina describes buying honey pomelos
from a fruit shop while she was a student in Shanghai
Nina Mingya Powles: Oh shall we get any mandarins as well?
Lucy: Oh yeah, we could get like a little bag.
The man in the shop expertly cuts the skin and the pith away
from the flesh and the fruit skin rips noisily away from the
membrane.
Are they...? They look good.
"It's a violent, tender process," Nina writes. As such
we decide not to eat our pomelos there and then, saving them for
later when we both have access to a sharp knife and somewhere
we can make a mess.
Automated checkout: 'Cashier number 4 please'
Lucy: Do you want to put one in your bag?
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah.
Lucy: Okay, should we go and eat a mandarin?
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, definitely.
I personally would just like...when I get home, I'll
probably sort of take the peel off by like making a cut and
then just ripping the skin off with my hands because it
does....I think if it's ripe enough, it will just come away.
It's very satisfying. And then like, it's got these massive
segments. And I'll just, yeah, with my hands I'll just pull
them apart, but then maybe put like, like, a quarter of pomelo
in like a little bowl and just eating it with my hands. But you
do end up probably, yeah, like sucking some of the...vessicles?
I think that's what they're... Like..
Lucy: Great word!
Nina Mingya Powles: The inside of the...yeah, the fruitiest
bit.
Lucy: Okay.
Nina Mingya Powles: The flesh, I guess maybe? I think the
individual...because you know...
Lucy: Yeah, they're like little pellets? They're called
vessicles?
Nina Mingya Powles: Vessicles, yeah, that might be like a
medical word as well.
Lucy: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine like a blood vessel or
something...Oh, that's great.
Nina Mingya Powles: Very like...in a pomelo. they're very
solid
Lucy: Very pronounced
Nina Mingya Powles: There's not this like juice happening.
Lucy: Because I feel like in a bad orange...they're often
pronounced and quite dry.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah. Pomelos, actually, when you open
it, it might seem like it's going to be dry. But then when
you bite into a chunk of vessicles....!
Lucy: It's not very appealing word. It's a good word, but...
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, then it can be quite...it'll be
really juicy.
Lucy: Okay. It's just that they've got a lot of structural
integrity.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah. But I actually don't really know how
other people eat pomelo. That's not a thing that I've really
eating, like, communally. I would always kind of do what we
just did, like buy one at a shop and then take it home and eat it
on my own, that's what I still do. But I did read that the skin
I think is sometimes used, like in Cantonese cooking. They will
like cook it, like braise it, which is really interesting. Not
so much the flesh. But I feel like surely also the flesh might
be used. But I've never had it.
Lucy: And would you eat the skin?
Nina Mingya Powles: I personally wouldn't, but...
Lucy: Yeah. Cos I feel like if you're gonna braise that it's
still gonna be...
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, I don't know,
Lucy: I guess it would just give a lot of flavour to the dish
Nina Mingya Powles: So I read...quite often, when I'm
like, searching for like, customs about Chinese festivals
or something, I found, I find myself on these really annoying
websites, they're like China travel guide.com. And they're
like, quite badly written and they're like, aimed at...I'm
guessing like tourists or people who want to like live in China
or something. But these are the ones that come up when you like,
like they're the top like Google hits. Very often like trying to
corraborate, corroborate, sorry, these these really annoying
website pages that will have like, symbolism of Chinese
fruits kind of thing.
Lucy: And you're trying to like, read between the lines,
Nina Mingya Powles: Exactly, and like read deeper and figure out
some context like, because it's not written. I don't I guess I'm
kind of guessing it's written for...not someone like me.
Lucy: Yeah, it is like a tourist thing. So it's quite a base
level understanding.
Nina Mingya Powles: But that is where I end up quite often
finding answers to these questions. But it was on a
website like that, where I read something about pamelo being
cooked, or parts of pomelo being cooked, particularly for good
luck around Chinese New Year. So don't know if that's true, but
according to a travel website...potentially it's true.
Lucy: The second reason why it's appropriate for Nina and I to be
walking the streets of central London looking for citrus, is
that there's a historical precedent for this too. The
things I read about the history of citrus in royal courts of the
16th, 17th and 18th centuries, made it seem like it was
reserved mostly for the elite, even when the prices did start
to decrease. But the historian Dr. Charlie Taverner, whose work
centered around street food particularly during the 17th and
18th centuries, sets me straight. Citrus was sold by
street sellers in London in numbers that are mind boggling
to me. In 1662-63, almost 750,000 oranges and lemons were
shipped in from Spain, and two and a half million from
Portugal. By the end of the 17th century, those figures had risen
to 4 million and 7 million respectively. Charlie's thesis
Selling food in the streets also explains potential
misconceptions about how much citrus was being consumed and by
whom. He describes how in the 1630s the author James Hart
suggested that oranges were mostly cooking ingredients. Hart
liked sour varieties but found sweet ones had no purpose.
However, as Charlie continues, this is not how oranges come
across in evidence of street vending. Across London they were
sold from barrows and in playhouses as sweet snacks. The
taste for sweeter oranges may have developed over the 17th
century as greater volumes arrived. In 1700, he writes,
John Houghton, an apothecary and writer, estimated that London
consumed a quarter of all oranges shipped into England.
"Citrus fruits were carried in the eye of all about the
streets, where they were very much consumed by ordinary
people." Perhaps how fruit was bought, he writes, offten a
small streetside parcels, explains why this has been
concealed.
I've found that there's a sort of mythology about the history
of citrus in London. The discovery of vitamin C as a
scurvy cure, and the subsequent adoption of first lemon and then
limes as an integral part of the British Navy's vittles is well
documented. Several sources cite this as a reason for the naming
of Limehouse, the point on the Thames where cargo was unloaded
from ocean-going ships and set on its way on the London canal
system. But other sources I read debunk this, describing the lime
kilns built there as the actual reason. The nursery rhyme
Oranges and Lemons are said to have originated as a result of
the location of St. Clements Danes Church on the Strand where
citrus was apparently first unloaded. But Dr. Charlie
Taverner's work describes Billingsgate - the old site near
London Bridge, not the newer market - which lies much further
east than St. Clements as the main arrival site for imported
fruit.
One of the fundamental questions I wanted but felt unable to
answer while making this episode was why we - people living in a
country with a climate that can't meaningfully sustain
citrus cultivation at the scale we need - are so obsessed with
lemons, oranges, limes, grapefruits and many other
citrus fruits. It feels so ingrained in our food, our
culture, our art even, and I can't help feeling that there's
something about living in a dark cold country that leads us to
dream of bright yellow, orange and green. "Do you know the land
where lemons grow?" is actually a translated line from Goethe's
poem, Mignon. It continues: "In darkened leaves the gold oranges
glow, a soft wind blows from the pure blue sky". Helena Attlee
also wrote about the other travellers from Northern Europe
who have been historically thrilled by the sight of Italian
citrus trees, Hans Christian Andersen and DH Lawrence to name
but two. You think they would be less surprise from Northern
Europeans nowadays, but I can vouch for my own excessive
excitement when a holiday let in Cyprus turned out to have its
own lemon tree ready for picking.
In Small Bodies of Water, the essay Unpeel reflects on the
outer and inner layers of fruit, but also ourselves.
Nina Mingya Powles: I think also of peeling fruit as a
very...like a symbol of affection, which I think is
really common across some different cultures. Like not
just Chinese or East Asian. But yeah, fruit is very often given
as a gift, which is really lovely. I noticed that when I
lived in Shanghai, fruit would often be given as a gift,
particularly at the New Year. Yeah, I wanted to write about
the skin of the fruit and the act of peeling...and yeah, the
symbolism around that. And the memories.
Lucy: Yeah, it feels like there's so much care inherent in
that act because it's like a quite painstaking thing.
Nina Mingya Powles: Exactly.
Lucy: And you write in the chapter Unpeel about like,
peeling the pith off segments for a friend like, you know,
it's just the so...it's so painstaking. And like, there's
so much effort that goes into it like, it's just a really
beautiful gesture of affection.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, actually that particular type of
mandarin that I think reminds me of being a teenager, like
midwinter, they'd be quite small, and you'd be able to peel
them really easily. So, when you pick them up, they'd be cold.
And you could feel like the...like, if you squish them,
not too hard, but then you could kind of feel a gap between the
actual fruit and the skin. So you could get your thumb under
it really easily. And so we'd eat those, like at morning tea
at school, and yeah, and I had a friend who, like, wouldn't want
to eat the little white strands. I guess when you're a teenager,
you have these weird things. And yeah, I remember like, removing
those and we'd like share a mandarin, which is very sweet.
Lucy Dearlove: Very sweet.
Lucy: Obviously, Small Bodies of Water is about...in part about
swimming and being in water. Do you think...in a sense, a citrus
fruit is a small body of water?
Nina Mingya Powles: Yes! And I...you've reminded me that...I
think I was like, I wasn't thinking that at first. But then
it made, yeah, it makes so much sense because they actually are
Lucy: Because they're contained and like unlike other pieces of
fruit...
Nina Mingya Powles: They're just water!
Lucy: Okay, I'm glad you said this because I was like, am I
reaching here?
Nina Mingya Powles: No! I really wanted...like I didn't know how
it would work. But I was hoping that there could be like, a
pomelo or a citrus on the cover, cos it's like...that's a small
body of water. It's fine, though. I really love how the
cover came out.
Lucy: The cover does look great.
Nina Mingya Powles: It's okay...but next book, maybe
should have like an orange on the cover.
Lucy: Yes.
Nina Mingya Powles: Or something? I think. Yeah. But
they did end up doing beautiful little illustrations. And yeah,
the illustrator drew a pomelo. Which is really lovely. So there
is a pomelo. But yes, exactly.
Lucy: Yeah. There isn't really any other fruit. Because you
were talking about like the contain the containment of it.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, there's something fleshy
particularly about them. I guess. Lots of fruit you have
that. But the softness. The way there's like different layers of
skin. And the texture of like, orange and mandarin skin is
sometimes a bit reminiscent of our skin.
Lucy: Yeah. I mean, like, even just the look of it like yeah,
it's almost got pores.
Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah. Like, this is a bit weird. But it's
just reminded me...so I'm allergic to nuts. So I carry an
EpiPen. And when I was a kid, I remember like me and my mom and
dad practicing on oranges with the EpiPen
Lucy: Yeah that's what they say you should do! Oh my god. Yeah,
cuz it's the closest thing like texturally...
Nina Mingya Powles: I guess...they could be
quite....the skin could be quite hard and thicker, but like
some... yeah...but it's like your thigh!
Lucy: Yeah. And because it is...you're like entering like a
barrier and then there's like something wet...no that's weird.
Nina Mingya Powles: Muscular!
Lucy: But sort of the same like make up... yeah, we have more in
common with them than we think.
Later that evening, when we're both at home, Nina sends me a
photo of her eating the fruit. My pomelo is soooo red, she
says, I can't resist cutting into mine straight away too,
ripping the skin and the thick pith away from the flesh. As
Nina described, the vessicles are large and distinct. And
she's right, it does somehow look dry. But as soon as I bite
into a segment, it's the juiciest, most delicious fruit.
This episode of Lecker was written produced and hosted by
me, Lucy Dearlove. Thanks so much to Selin and Nina for being
a part of this episode. Three: Acid, Texture, Contrast by Selin
Kiazim, and Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles are
both out now. And thanks also to the long list of writers and
academics whose work contributed to this exploration of citrus.
I've listed a full bibliography on the Lecker website because
it's a fascinating topic. And there's so many directions I
could have gone, so many great details I missed out because I
just didn't have space. I read so many brilliant books and
articles while making this episode, so I really invite you
to check them out as well. If you'd like to support Lecker,
you can donate to the patreon patreon.com/leckerpodcast. There
are now monthly free newsletters for Patreon followers, and
monthly bonus podcast episodes for paid Patreon subscribers.
Other ways you can support Lecker? Rate and review on Apple
podcasts or Spotify. Buy merch from the Lecker Big Cartel site
and tell your friends.
Ben McDonald creates original illustrations for every episode
of Lecker and they're beautiful. You can see those on Instagram
and Twitter @leckerpodcast and I'm also posting sporadically on
Tik Tok with the same handle. I'm quite scared of Tiktok so
come and join me. Music is by bluedot sessions. I'll be back
in your podcast feeds next month. Thanks for listening