The saying about life giving you lemons is truth be told rather misleading.
Lemons are in my opinion wonderous fruits, far more useful then just as ingredients for lemonade.
If life has given you lemons, or even better, a whole lemon tree, than truly you are blessed, because these are some of the most delightful multi-purpose products of the fruit world.
The song is just as mistaken: lemons are many things, but impossible to eat is not one of them. From using the grated rind and juice in my daily salad, to brightening flavours in soups, stews and curries, enhancing a fruit salad, prevent apples and other fruits from browning, making soothing teas, cheerful lemon curds and lemon cream for tarts, the famous merengue pie, playfully sweet-tangy biscuits and scones, a zingy partner for fish and chicken to simply adding a few slices or a little fresh juice to a humble glass of water, lemon, or occasionally its green cousin, lime, is a staple in our home year round.
We are very thankful to have a lemon tree. When it is in blossom it fragrances our garden with a heady sweet perfume. When its fruit is ripe it is a delight to just stand near the tree and inhale the delicate scent. I love the way the kitchen smells when grating the rind, especially on freshly picked lemons. After Sukkot I use another lemon relative, our etrog, to make a pomader, preserving the delicious lemonyness with clove spikes to use as our besamim for havdalah each week.
In these rollercoaster covid times we are profoundly grateful for our fruit trees more than ever. This is our third lockdown and truly I have come to appreciate these trees in a much more visceral way. They have become like friends, I feel I know them so much better for spending so much time looking out the window at my little patch of green among the concrete and stone.
They mark the passage of time when days and weeks feel as though they have lost meaning. The evergreen lemon doesn't lose its leaves like the mulberry or the pomegranate, but it still changes through the months, alternately budding, blossoming, raising its young or groaning under the weight of fruit ripe for harvesting. Sometimes it does a few of these at once.
We do not possess the greenest of thumbs and for the most part our garden is in shade, not ideal I fear for most of our trees, but of all of them the lemon and kumquat have been the most forgiving and the kindest. Of these two, there is no contest that the lemon provides us with the greatest benefit, though we are very fond of them all.
Today felt a bit festive despite the lockdown because we harvested about 4 kg of ripe lemons. How I adore the aroma of the fresh lemons as we pick them. Our tree flowered twice last year so these were just the first batch of lemons. Plenty of green ones still growing on the tree that look like they will need a while longer to ripen.
Lucky then that we love lemons so very much.
For all that I am a lemon fan I confess that I have not identified the variety we grow. The tree was planted by the previous residents. They have amazing flavour, a pleasant almost sweet-tartness when fresh picked, which certainly does put me in the mind of Meyer lemons, though I don't think that is what they are.
On the day I pick fresh lemons, when they are at their most fragrant and juicy, I love to make lemon pasta. The recipe is very simple, learnt from cookery writer Debbie Koenig, but it's just perfection: olive oil, grated lemon zest and juice, salt, black pepper, some grated parmesan, kashkeval, grana padano or kishk.
I experiment with whatever pasta I have in the cupboard, delicious with rice or kasha as well. This time I found amazing whole wheat papparadelle which married beautifully with the aromatic lemon sauce. Everyone licked their bowls clean.
It's become something of a family tradition, a personal Lemon Festival. The children help to pick the fruit. Then we weigh it to calculate the trumot and maasrot, the biblical tithes religious Jews living in Israel must take from fruits and vegetables they harvest. Until the trumot and maasrot have been deducted the produce is tevel, not kosher for consumption.
The tradition reminds us to share our good fortune by donating to the poor and links us to our ancient past by remembering the contributions the farming population gave to the priestly tribe of Levi, which was not allocated agricultural land because their job was pastoral, as teachers of Torah and to serve in the ancient Tabernacle and later Temple. To the best of my knowledge there were no lemons in ancient Israel, but simply growing some of our own produce here and preserving these customs connects us to generations of our ancestors and their fruit trees.
And then we feast together over a lemon pasta dinner, with salad dressed with lemon juice, and tea with slices of our lemons. Basic and filling and our own mini family celebration to thank God for this wonderful treat we have been granted, these bright, sunny lemons that ripen in the middle of winter.
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