One of my least favorite things about winter is the constant chatter of vox pops on the local news, in which people express the novel notion that it’s very, very cold out, and they don’t like it. I don’t like cold weather either, at least not this kind of cold, but I find it necessary. I am a big believer in seasons, and to me a fierce winter is the price you pay for a gentle spring, much as a baking-hot summer is the price you pay for a brilliant, crisp autumn. I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, and I learned early to mistrust that warm snap in February, when the temperature would near 50 degrees, the ice would turn into little tributaries, and the dirt would feel soft underneath my boots. I knew that this was a debt we were incurring, and within weeks we would have to pay up. Sure enough, we would wake up one morning to 7 degrees, with a 15-below wind chill. When Stephen King wrote in his novella “The Sun Dog” that it was the debt that hurt you but the interest that broke your back, I thought immediately of those winters.
I am even more leery of winters that never get very cold, 50 degrees and wet all winter long. Not only is it dreary—too warm for snow activities, too cold for much else—but once spring arrives, there is a sameness to it all; that soft mud, that gentle air, it becomes status quo, rather than the marvel it should be. It should be a marvel, to walk around the city, or sit in my parents’ backyard, or troop through woods and meadows, feeling warm air on my face and arms like a gift, feeling loved on this earth, all of us rewarded for our patience during those long dark fierce winter months. Because I am descended, on both sides of my family, from peoples of cold dark northerly green countries, I can’t have one without the other. So the Arctic cold front currently grinding the East Coast under its bootheel should fit right into my plans. Only...Jesus, it’s cold. I had forgotten how strenuous and draining it is, living in this kind of cold, how every gust of wind feels like an assault. I had forgotten the dread of waking up and seeing frost on the windows, knowing that that was the harbinger of a particular brand of cold, the kind that made you feel that you were being eaten alive. I had also forgotten how LuthorCorp loves to overcompensate in extreme weather, leaving us bluelipped in the dog days of August, and dry-roasted on a day when the wind chill hit 30 below zero. It is enough to make a girl run shrieking, or at least dream of escape. My dear friends who live in balmier and more temperate zones have graciously invited me and/or Lloyd to head southward or westward until all of this arctic nonsense blows over. Fresser that I am, though, there is only one place I want to go right now: anyplace in Australia, or New Zealand, where I can get my hands on some finger limes.
When the weather turns cold, I deal with it in two ways. One is to make a lot of rib-sticker foods, one-pot dishes: the famous braised chicken and chestnuts from Land of Plenty; beef with carrots and prunes, covered with stout and baked for hours in a slow oven; the wonderful Gran’maw Peacock’s Chicken and Rice from The Gift of Southern Cooking by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock. This is one of the best chicken & rice dishes you will ever eat, and it is also one of the easiest things you could ever make. (Since this is a copyrighted recipe, I will not post it, but if you are keen to try it, e me.) The other way is to turn 180 degrees from the baked and stodgy and embrace the warm and zippy. This year I have backed down from my normally strict insistence on eating with the seasons, simply because there are only so many baked parsnips one can eat without screaming. This year I have fallen back on chile peppers, haricots verts, broccoli, mustard greens and black kale. I have come back to cabbage, loathed in childhood, adored now that I know the proper way to eat it (raw, pickled or very lightly cooked). And I find myself giving thanks every day that I was born in a time where limes are cheap and plentiful.
I am a mad fool for tart, sour flavors. Much as a normal person’s mouth waters at the thought of a perfectly roasted prime rib, a bowl of buttery peas or a coconut cake with seven-minute icing, so does mine at the thought of a green tomato pickle, or the little rose-colored Greek pickled onions known as volvi, or the biting tamarind candies that I sometimes find in Asian markets. At this time of year I envy my British friends with access to forced rhubarb, as over here we don’t see the best and affordable stuff until May, and so I must wait, tastebuds humming in anticipation. To my mind, though, the best taste in the world is to be found inside a passion fruit, so unpromising at first glance (that wrinkled shell! those spooky seeds!) but so brilliant and sunny and tart and loaded with promise. Every time I share a passion fruit with someone, the reaction is the same: a look of trepidation, a startled “oh!” at first taste, a smile. This lovely fruit has two big drawbacks, though: it lends itself better to sweet dishes than to savories, and, at least where I live, they are expensive. The market where I find them charges $1.75 a piece for them; this for a single fruit that yields about a tablespoon of pulp. There are few things more dispiriting than to open up a cookbook and see “passion fruit, about two dozen” in the ingredient list. I keep hearing rumors of passion fruit being cultivated in Florida and California, cheaper by far than the pricy imported Pacific Rim fruit. I am still waiting.
No, what I really need to get me through the winter is a fruit that is cheap and plentiful, can be used in sweets and savories alike, and makes me feel like a little ray of sunshine, inside and out. Lemons do the trick beautifully. Limes do it even better.
As part of my overall January post-holiday, pre-spring dietary housecleaning, I have been cooking my way through Sally Schneider’s A New Way to Cook. Ordinarily I have no truck with low-fat, or even lower-fat, cookbooks; I have no patience for regimes and I have never embraced, in Nigella Lawson’s words, the way, the truth and the lite, but into every stubbornly-held crotchet falls an exception, and A New Way to Cook is mine. Some of the recipes are more high-maintenance cookery than others; for every brown butter/balsamic vinegar sauce, there are about ten recipes with long ingredient lists and very specific cooking techniques. Tonight I will be making hummus, the fodder for a dozen brown-bag lunches, and thus I will be toasting spices, grinding them, chopping garlic, blending them all together with tahini and lemon juice and then zizzing them in the food processor, along with the chickpeas I soaked on Monday and cooked last night. It is all worth it, I tell myself, because when I am done I can have a fruit salad dressed with Greek yogurt, brown sugar, cardamom and lime juice.
I have been eating insane quantities of limes, in seafood salad, in Thai hot and sour soup, in “brick chicken” (chicken marinated in lime juice, garlic and rosemary, pressed under a foil-wrapped brick and cooked in a cast-iron skillet). Normally there is no better way to roast a chicken than with a lemon up its bottom, but every once in a while I use a lime instead, and the result is a familiar yet exotic flavor. I’d always known in the back of my mind that lime juice + fish sauce + chile + ginger + rice vinegar + a little pinch of sugar was a workable combination, but I never realized just how gloriously all these flavors mesh together, particularly when you heat them for a few minutes. And I won’t even begin to discuss desserts—well, okay, I will begin to discuss desserts. The best cake I know how to make, the closest thing to a signature cake that I have, is a basic buttermilk cake, the kind you can find in cookbooks from Maida Heatter to Gale Gand, flavored with a lot of cardamom (do you sense a theme here?) and lime zest, soaked with quantities of lime syrup when you pull it hot from the oven. I made baked apricots last night, dried California apricots (so much bigger, brighter and more tart than their Turkish counterparts) soaked to plumpness, dressed with some of the soaking liquid, sugar flavored with cardamom and the inside of a vanilla bean, and several squeezes of lime juice. I ate those sticky, warm apricots with a little blob of full-fat Greek yogurt, and trust me, there was not a part of my body that wasn’t happy when I ate it.
You would think that I have a bit of an obsession with limes, those unprepossessing little handballs in the supermarket, nice enough for a gin and tonic but little else. Until last week I would have disagreed with you; I would have said that limes are greatly underappreciated, their propensity to flood the coldest, most arctic days with warmth and sunshine vastly underrated. I would have said, hopefully not too meanly, it’s not my problem, it’s yours, you philistine, you. Then the New York Times food section ran an article (since archived on their web page, damn them) about exotic limes, such as the Thai cuisine fixture makrut lime (never kaffir lime, not on this page, at least). On the front page was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, the cross section of an Australian finger lime. The little elongated juice sacs that make up a section of citrus fruit, those that are so lovely when your fruit is fresh and sweet, and so nasty when it is old and dried out, are called vesicles. The vesicles in a finger lime are perfectly round and large, about the size of fish roe, or large-pearl tapioca. Apparently Ferran Adria, the chef at El Bulli in Spain, was moved to tears when he tried one, and Daniel Boulud, a very snappy piece of cheese in the New York restaurant world, is aching to get his hands on finger limes for his restaurant. We cannot get them here, at least not yet. And thus my obsession is fostered. I imagine cutting a finger lime open, tipping the vesicles into my mouth, crunching them between tongue and palate, feeling my mouth fill with intense sunshine, and I know, I have to go wherever I can go to find those, right now.