Catherine Phipps - Citrus : recipes that celebrate the sour and the sweet

Writing about citrus fruits these last months has been a joyous experience. I can, along with other food writers who reside in the chilly north, live vicariously through the ingredients I use. I pick up an Italian lemon and have a strong sense of place terraced hillsides, a glimpse of Capri blue sea in the distance, a light breeze made dense by the scent of blossom. It is romantic and evocative, and just holding and smelling a lemon can bring that warmth into the most dreary of winter days.

I have been lucky enough to (briefly) live in a place where I could daily pick limes, sour oranges and grapefruits from the trees. Even now I can regularly visit my parents in Greece, where the pervasive scent of citrus is forever entwined with that of the dusty, resinous mountain herbs. However, when I take time to think about citrus and everything I associate with them, I realize my overriding memories are rooted in the domestic. I remember the moment I walked into the kitchen and caught my (then five-year-old) son studiously zesting one of my best Amalfi lemons, for the smell, mummy!. I think about the scent of the kitchen on baking or preserving days drizzle cakes warm with a mandarin syrup and shelves lined with jars of curd and marmalade. A chicken roasting in the oven, its overwhelming savouriness lifted by a sharp, sweet hit of lemon. The rum punches during the rained-off summer party, when sour orange juice, stored from winter, is mixed with sherbety lime. And most recently, the thumbnail absentmindedly scraping away at the skin of a bergamot or mandarin, also to release the smell.

I think further back, all the way to my childhood, and realize how the romance of citrus is wrapped up in nostalgia and the seasons and that this informs the things I make year on year. And whilst I associate summer with lemons lemon and elderflower cordial, lemonade, mousses decorated with borage leaves, clean-tasting ice creams the winter months that fall either side of Christmas are about orange-hued fruits. There is the memory of the satsuma in the Christmas stocking (desiccating peel left on the bedside table, well into January; an instant pot pourri), a small table laden with citrus-flavoured Turkish delight and marzipan sitting alongside Medjool dates, sugared almonds and nuts ready for cracking, and mandarins in the Christmas trifle. These days I also look forward to the leafy citrus displays that appear from November, ready to be transformed into cakes, puddings and liqueurs. I will think about starting Christmas dinner with a palate-awakening puntarelle and orange salad, and make gallons of bergamot-or mandarin-cello. In January, I wait for the first Seville and blood oranges to come into season, for annual marmalade and curd making. And when the late winter palate becomes jaded from all the rich comfort food, and I mourn the loss of bergamots, sour oranges and mandarins, I ease myself into spring by using an abundance of sweet oranges, limes and lemons in salads, soups and casseroles.

I love all of the individual flavours and aromas of citrus, and the fact that I can use them in a wide range of international dishes. Their progression, historically, from East to West means that few cuisines are forced to do without them. And whilst we do make certain associations lemons mainly with the Mediterranean countries of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, limes belonging to the tropics it is of course more complicated than that.