Imagine one fine day someone who is dressed, well out of times and is behaving a little odd and he or she tells you that he or she is a time traveler who has come from the past or history; he or she has come from around a time 5000 years ago! (Or at least that is what he or she tells you!); well what do you do?
One sure fire test is to ask him or her to make lemon juice! Or if you are from Kerala, maybe lemon sherbet or soda!
If he or she makes an amazing lemon juice or lemonade then, well you can drink it (at your own risk!) but rest assured that he or she is not from the past!
That is because there was no lemon 5000 years before!
The Lemon is only about a few thousand years old!
I still remember the big oval lemons we used to get in Assam! Those had so much juice but were surprisingly bitter! The first time we tasted those lemon juice at one party; it was so bitter that no amount of salt or sugar could make us gulp it!
I quietly poured that juice on a potted plant! Sadly during the next visit, well let us just say that the plant had some issues!
Now we love the lemon! It must be yellow and round and spot less to be only sour and not bitter! You must soak them in warm water and then use! I used to make nice lemon juice which my mother used to love so rest assured I am not 5000 years old!
Now the lemon is a cross breed of several fruits!
One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for its use in marmalade, cocktails, and tea. The bitter orange has about six different varieties, the best known being the Seville orange (the famous ingredient in marmalade) and the bergamot orange (used in Earl Grey tea).
The bitter orange itself is a hybrid of two other citrus fruits: the pomelo and the mandarin! The pomelo is a large, sweet citrus fruit, often described as the largest in the citrus family! It’s known for its thick, easy-to-peel rind and juicy, sweet-tart flesh. Pomelos are native to Southeast Asia and are considered an ancestor of many other cultivated citrus varieties, including grapefruit!
Finally a mandarin orange (Citrus reticulata), often simply called mandarin, is a small, rounded citrus tree fruit. The mandarin is small and oblate, unlike the roughly spherical sweet orange (which is again a mandarin-pomelo hybrid). The taste is sweeter and stronger than the common orange.
Then you have the citron! Or Citrus medica historically also known as cedrate which is a large fragrant citrus fruit with a thick rind. It resembles a ‘huge, rough lemon’. Now that I think about it, the bitter lemon I had in Assam may have been the citron!
Finally to create our lemon, the bitter orange was cross bred with the citron!
And soon enough the prodigal son lemon was more popular than its parents!
Now of course you have so many varieties of lemon and so many uses! All you need next time is to make a lemon without the seeds! Then you can actually crack yourself and say like Tiku Talsania! Yeh kya ho raha hai!
Shubh ratri!
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