Lucy Dearlove: This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove. This

month...Oranges and Lemons

Selin Kiazim: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: This holy trinity is the subtitle of Selin's

latest book, Three: acid, texture, and contrast.

Selin Kiazim: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: So interesting. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.

Selin Kiazim: 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: Wrong kind of lemony.

Selin Kiazim: Wrong kind of lemony, yeah

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: 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: 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: So tell me about your relationship with citrus.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: 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: 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: 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: So these ones say red pomelo.

Lucy Dearlove: Is that the same as honey?

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Okay, yeah, pink flesh...

Nina Mingya Powles: Pink class one! Shall we get one of these?

Lucy: Yeah.

Nina Mingya Powles: I'm kind of squeezing it but I don't

really...

Lucy: 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: I like that this one's not giant. Some of

them are really giant.

Lucy: Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna get one of these as well.

Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah. So that's a pretty good price for a

pomelo, I would say, in London

Lucy: 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: Oh shall we get any mandarins as well?

Lucy: 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: 'Cashier number 4 please'

Lucy: Do you want to put one in your bag?

Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah.

Lucy: Okay, should we go and eat a mandarin?

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Great word!

Nina Mingya Powles: The inside of the...yeah, the fruitiest

bit.

Lucy: Okay.

Nina Mingya Powles: The flesh, I guess maybe? I think the

individual...because you know...

Lucy: Yeah, they're like little pellets? They're called

vessicles?

Nina Mingya Powles: Vessicles, yeah, that might be like a

medical word as well.

Lucy: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine like a blood vessel or

something...Oh, that's great.

Nina Mingya Powles: Very like...in a pomelo. they're very

solid

Lucy: Very pronounced

Nina Mingya Powles: There's not this like juice happening.

Lucy: Because I feel like in a bad orange...they're often

pronounced and quite dry.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: It's not very appealing word. It's a good word, but...

Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, then it can be quite...it'll be

really juicy.

Lucy: Okay. It's just that they've got a lot of structural

integrity.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: And would you eat the skin?

Nina Mingya Powles: I personally wouldn't, but...

Lucy: Yeah. Cos I feel like if you're gonna braise that it's

still gonna be...

Nina Mingya Powles: Yeah, I don't know,

Lucy: I guess it would just give a lot of flavour to the dish

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: And you're trying to like, read between the lines,

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Yeah, it is like a tourist thing. So it's quite a base

level understanding.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: 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: 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: Yeah, it feels like there's so much care inherent in

that act because it's like a quite painstaking thing.

Nina Mingya Powles: Exactly.

Lucy: 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: 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: Very sweet.

Lucy: 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: 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: Because they're contained and like unlike other pieces of

fruit...

Nina Mingya Powles: They're just water!

Lucy: Okay, I'm glad you said this because I was like, am I

reaching here?

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: The cover does look great.

Nina Mingya Powles: It's okay...but next book, maybe

should have like an orange on the cover.

Lucy: Yes.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Yeah. There isn't really any other fruit. Because you

were talking about like the contain the containment of it.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Yeah. I mean, like, even just the look of it like yeah,

it's almost got pores.

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: Yeah that's what they say you should do! Oh my god. Yeah,

cuz it's the closest thing like texturally...

Nina Mingya Powles: 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: 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: Muscular!

Lucy: 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