Sour things have a high concentration of protons, the active particles with a positive electrical charge. When protons move around freely, they attach themselves quickly to nearby molecules and immediately change them. The sensation of sourness comes from protons hitting your tongue.
There are some interesting similarities and differences in growing wine grapes and growing lemons. Unlike grapes on a vine, lemons on a tree thrive in near-constant humidity. Like grapes, they develop acidity and color when they get cold (ideally as low as fifty degrees fahrenheit, from time to time, for lemons). A major challenge in lemon farming is achieving this cold temperature without freezing - lemons, like grapes, are very sensitive to frost.
I’m writing about lemons this week because, at some point, I stopped seasoning my cooking with acidity. We most often think of salt as seasoning, which, when correctly used, brings out the flavor of the other ingredients, rather than registering as salt on your palate. Acidity can be seasoning in the same way. Lemons were my favorite tool to achieve this.
I learned to season food with acidity originally from my Mom, a lover of lemons, a cook with great finesse. She squeezes a little lemon on most things right before eating or serving them - from pasta to mushrooms to scrambled eggs. I was reminded of this when I worked with a chef who emphasized acidity and salinity in his cooking. This chef was particularly aggressive on seasoning - like a lot of chefs he seasoned all garnishes as well - this meant tossing your cilantro or whatever you have in lemon and oil and salt. It sounds smart but in practice usually winds up with some beaten and bruised greens propped up on the plate. It can be done well, but it’s really difficult to calibrate your hand at seasoning to such a small amount of delicate leaves. Seasoning started to feel like a force of destruction, of degradation, putting down instead of lifting up.
Another reason I’ve moved away from lemon is my sensitivity to the fact that they don’t grow around here. I have tried, as I know many other cooks have, to deploy vinegar in its place. You can make vinegar, get it locally, and it is historically Midwestern, part of the pickling and preserving culture we have here, in part due to the Scandinavian influence. My greatest success with this has been in soup. I’m sure there’s chemistry at work I have yet to understand - heating the vinegar seems to release some of its own edge and sink it into the other flavors in the pot. You might try this with a lentil soup or tofu soup or tomato soup even. Seasoning a cooked plate with vinegar is more challenging. The fruitiness of lemon melds with other flavors more cohesively. I’ve been denying this because this knobby yellow fruit can feel so out of place in my Illinois kitchen.
And, in place of lemon, I've been relying on wine as the seasoning for food. I’ve cooked a few dinners with so much acidity on the plate that, when you drink a wine that is also high in acidity you can’t really taste anything besides sourness. So then I framed a choice between lemons and wine, and I chose wine.
What’s changed is I learned you can layer acidity, even as a seasoning. A few weeks ago my friends made steak au poivre, and swirled a round slice of lemon in the creamy sauce as it was finishing cooking. It added a fruitiness and lightness to the meal that was delicious. We drank Nuit d’Orage from Clos Fantine - which was also bright and brought good acidity. There was room for both with the creamy, spicy sauce, beef fat and salt. Lemon is a specific flavor to me, it is not just sourness. It has to be dosed carefully. When I season things right, they don’t taste like lemon, they taste like themselves. The au poivre tasted like black pepper and cream and brandy, but with a special quality.
The round of lemon represented a greater sensitivity to the addition of lemon - drawing out not just juice but citrus oil and a little bitterness. A lot of attention is paid to the gesture of seasoning with salt (Salt Bae represents the vile peak of this). As overplayed as it is, to season from a height above your food, or low to the surface makes a big difference. One of my friends who cooked the steak au poivre is a chef. His gesture of cutting this slice of citrus and gently steering it around the skillet inspired me. Seasoning is about gesture, and lemon is no exception.
Having digested this idea, last week I made a lamb tagine. I put it in the oven and took a nap and overslept, and the tagine braised a little too long. It got a little jammy, the dried and rehydrated apricots had melted. It was delicious but rich. A generous squeeze of lemon made it much more palatable. Diced preserved lemon would have also been nice. With the tagine, I drank a bottle of Malas Uvas from La Perdida. This wine makes you salivate as soon as you smell it. It is very salty and enticing and smells very bright and sharp. In concert with the lemon juice, it livened the dinner and made the tagine feel complete.
When I told her about this blog idea, Em lent me a book called Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. I recommend it. There’s a chapter on lemons. Visser includes an adage from the 19-century British doctor/reverend/wit Sydney Smith. It reminded me of both feeling far from where lemons grow here in Chicago, and yet of course they are easy to find and relatively affordable. “Life is a difficult thing in the country, and it requires a good deal of forethought to steer the ship, when you live twelve miles from a lemon.” I once received advice from Em that I’ll share with you – always pick up a lemon when you’re at the store, even if you don’t need it right away. You wind up wanting one more often than you realize.
We have lots of new wines in store, particularly from a winery in Alsace called Kumpf & Meyer. This is a new winery to us, and we’ve been enjoying all the wines so far. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or curiosities - you can email us rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or DM @rainbow_wines.
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