Oranges and Lemons
An audio exploration of our love of citrus, with chef Selin Kiazim and writer Nina Mingya Powles.
Three: Acid, Texture, Contrast by Selim Kiazim and Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles are both out now!
Lecker is written and produced by Lucy Dearlove
You can find a full bibliography for this episode below!
Ben McDonald creates original illustrations for every episode of Lecker.
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You can listen to this episode on your podcast platform of choice, or via the Audioboom player right here.
Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.
You can access the transcript for this episode below.
Illustration by Ben McDonald
Bibliography
Helena Attlee - The Land Where Lemons Grow
Kate Colquhoun - Taste: The Story of Britain through its Cooking
Selin Kiazim - Three: Acid, Texture, Contrast
John McPhee - Oranges
Nina Mingya Powles - Small Bodies of Water
Nina Mingya Powles - Tiny Moons
Toby Sonneman - Lemon: A Global History
Dr Charlie Taverner - Selling food in the streets of London, c.1600–1750
Margaret Visser - Much Depends on Dinner
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Transcript
Lucy Dearlove 00:02
This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove. This month...Oranges and Lemons
Selin Kiazim 00:18
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 00:34
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 00:51
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 01:04
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 01:23
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 02:19
This holy trinity is the subtitle of Selin's latest book, Three: acid, texture, and contrast.
Selin Kiazim 02:26
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 03:12
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 03:39
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 04:37
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 05:33
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 05:50
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 09:45
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 11:25
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 11:57
So interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.
Selin Kiazim 12:00
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 12:47
Wrong kind of lemony.
Selin Kiazim 12:48
Wrong kind of lemony, yeah
Nina Mingya Powles 13:01
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 13:24
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 13:47
Small Bodies of Waters is like mostly about swimming and water and migration. But I couldn't help but 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 14:15
So tell me about your relationship with citrus.
Nina Mingya Powles 14:22
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 16:04
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 16:20
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 16:40
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 18:44
So these ones say red pomelo.
Lucy Dearlove 18:48
Is that the same as honey?
Nina Mingya Powles 18:50
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 19:00
Okay, yeah, pink flesh...
Nina Mingya Powles 19:03
Pink class one! Shall we get one of these?
Lucy 19:09
Yeah.
Nina Mingya Powles 19:13
I'm kind of squeezing it but I don't really...
Lucy 19:16
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 19:21
I like that this one's not giant. Some of them are really giant.
Lucy 19:23
Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna get one of these as well.
Nina Mingya Powles 19:26
Yeah. So that's a pretty good price for a pomelo, I would say, in London
Lucy 19:41
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 19:49
Oh shall we get any mandarins as well?
Lucy 19:52
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 20:20
'Cashier number 4 please'
Lucy 20:25
Do you want to put one in your bag?
Nina Mingya Powles 20:26
Yeah.
Lucy 20:41
Okay, should we go and eat a mandarin?
Nina Mingya Powles 20:44
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 21:29
Great word!
Nina Mingya Powles 21:29
The inside of the...yeah, the fruitiest bit.
Lucy 21:34
Okay.
Nina Mingya Powles 21:34
The flesh, I guess maybe? I think the individual...because you know...
Lucy 21:38
Yeah, they're like little pellets? They're called vessicles?
Nina Mingya Powles 21:41
Vessicles, yeah, that might be like a medical word as well.
Lucy 21:45
Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine like a blood vessel or something...Oh, that's great.
Nina Mingya Powles 21:50
Very like...in a pomelo. they're very solid
Lucy 21:52
Very pronounced
Nina Mingya Powles 21:53
There's not this like juice happening.
Lucy 21:55
Because I feel like in a bad orange...they're often pronounced and quite dry.
Nina Mingya Powles 21:59
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 22:10
It's not very appealing word. It's a good word, but...
Nina Mingya Powles 22:14
Yeah, then it can be quite...it'll be really juicy.
Lucy 22:16
Okay. It's just that they've got a lot of structural integrity.
Nina Mingya Powles 22:19
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 22:55
And would you eat the skin?
Nina Mingya Powles 23:00
I personally wouldn't, but...
Lucy 23:01
Yeah. Cos I feel like if you're gonna braise that it's still gonna be...
Nina Mingya Powles 23:03
Yeah, I don't know,
Lucy 23:04
I guess it would just give a lot of flavour to the dish
Nina Mingya Powles 23:08
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 23:52
And you're trying to like, read between the lines,
Nina Mingya Powles 23:54
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 24:07
Yeah, it is like a tourist thing. So it's quite a base level understanding.
Nina Mingya Powles 24:11
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 24:30
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 29:22
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 30:08
Yeah, it feels like there's so much care inherent in that act because it's like a quite painstaking thing.
Nina Mingya Powles 30:13
Exactly.
Lucy 30:13
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 30:26
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 31:14
Very sweet.
Lucy 31:20
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 31:33
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 31:45
Because they're contained and like unlike other pieces of fruit...
Nina Mingya Powles 31:48
They're just water!
Lucy 31:49
Okay, I'm glad you said this because I was like, am I reaching here?
Nina Mingya Powles 31:52
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 32:05
The cover does look great.
Nina Mingya Powles 32:06
It's okay...but next book, maybe should have like an orange on the cover.
Lucy 32:11
Yes.
Nina Mingya Powles 32:11
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 32:24
Yeah. There isn't really any other fruit. Because you were talking about like the contain the containment of it.
Nina Mingya Powles 32:32
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 33:00
Yeah. I mean, like, even just the look of it like yeah, it's almost got pores.
Nina Mingya Powles 33:05
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 33:21
Yeah that's what they say you should do! Oh my god. Yeah, cuz it's the closest thing like texturally...
Nina Mingya Powles 33:29
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 33:35
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 33:42
Muscular!
Lucy 33:45
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