Good morning,

The scent of bergamot and of Meyer lemons — the latter, especially — will forever transport me back to my days in the pastry corner of the Babbo kitchen. Surely I’d had Earl Grey tea, the black tea famously flavored with bergamot oil, before then, even if I’d never seen a specimen of the actual citrus fruit (or, for that matter, known it was one). But not so for the Meyer lemon; that was a completely new aroma to me that will forever haunt me with its facile power to conjure life in my early twenties: a stainless-steel kitchen, lavender-colored kitchen towels, black Sharpies, a convection oven set to three hundred degrees Fahrenheit…

The familiarly fragrant, zest-able, juice-able fruits of the Citrus genus — the oranges and grapefruits, the lemons and limes, the tangelos and Sumos — are among the world’s most widely cultivated and beloved. But there’s more to the wider citrus family, taxonomically speaking (scientific name: Rutaceae), even beyond the more exotic fruit varieties that stand out in my memories described above. You might be surprised, as I was, to learn that this taxonomic family counts among its members the source plants for some other culinarily significant products. The two I’ll highlight here are curry leaves and Sichuan peppercorns.

Please let me know if what follows sparks any recipe ideas (for either of us to try)! Talk to you soon.

Brian

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CITRUS FRUITS

Southeast Asia (today’s southwestern China, Myanmar, and northeastern India) “is generally considered the origin of Citrus.”1 At least five types of citrus trees “had reached… al-Andalus (i.e., the Iberian Peninsula) between the tenth and eleventh centuries” – likely the citron (“known already by the Greeks and Romans”), the lemon, the lime, pomelo, and the sour (aka bitter or Seville) orange. “The sweet orange…was introduced to Europe by the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and both the mandarin…and grapefruit…between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries…”2

Not to get all “Webster’s defines orange as…”, but I can’t resist sharing this illuminating entry from The American Heritage Dictionary on the etymology of the world’s most popular citrus fruit:

If we trace the origin of the English word orange from its source, we follow the path of the fruit as its popularity expands from Asia to Europe. The ultimate origins of the word lie in the Dravidian language family, a family of languages spoken in South Asia that includes Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. The modern Tamil word for an orange, for example, is nāram, and in ancient times, a Dravidian word similar to this was adopted into the Indo-European language Sanskrit as nārangah. As the fruit passed westward from India, so did the word for it, becoming Persian nārang and Arabic nāranj. The Arabs brought the first oranges to Spain and Sicily between the 8th and 10th centuries, and from there the popularity of the fruit spread throughout Europe. The Arabic word is the source of Old Italian arancio, "orange tree," and this word was compounded with Old Italian mela, "apple," to make melarancio, referring to the fruit of the orange tree. Old Italian melarancio was translated into Old French as pume d’orenge, "apple of the orange tree. The a in the Old Italian word was replaced by o in Old French due to the influence of the name of the town of Orange (from which oranges reached the northern part of France) and possibly also due to the influence of the Old French word or, "gold" (by association with the rich color of the fruit). In the final stage in the journey of the word, the Old French form was borrowed into Middle English, at first spelled orenge in a text dating from around 1400. The English word orange begins to be used to designate the color orange in the 16th century.3

In addition to the Citrus genus’s dietary significance, its plants also bestow essential oils and floral infusions that “are widely used in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics, perfumery, and food industries” for both their “natural fruity perfumes” and their “potent antioxidant, analgesic, anxiolytic4, neuroprotective, and antimicrobial activities.”5 One such oil is the neroli that perfumes my aftershave lotion and about whose origins I was until now ignorant; it’s extracted from the blossoms of the bitter orange tree. Who knew.

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CURRY LEAF

Frustrating though it may be to digest this fact, the curry leaf is a very separate thing from the dishes we call curries, despite the common word origin and the fact that curry leaf may be used as an ingredient in a curry dish. Curries are seasoned with a mixture of spices. Curry leaves, on the other hand, come from the curry leaf tree (Murraya koenigii), “a small, tropical to sub-tropical tree or shrub…native to moist forests in India and Sri Lanka”6 and, “at present” – if we can pretend for a moment that it’s presently 1985, as that’s the most recent information I’ve found on the matter – “it is [also] cultivated in Burma, Ceylon, China, Australia and the Pacific Islands.” 7