The Lemon Wins

If I were forced to give up every fruit in the world but one I would have absolutely no trouble choosing. The lemon wins, hands down.

The lemon is the workhorse of the food world: dependable, versatile, and available all year round. You can preserve it in salt, as the Moroccans do, and stuff your chicken with it, or you can stick it into a suet crust surrounded by butter, as the British do. You can dice it up and put it into a salad with red onion and Italian parsley. You can make lemon cookies, lemon cake, lemon icing, lemonade (hot or cold), lemon flip, and lemon rice pudding. A drop of lemon juice and a strip of lemon peel make a chicken soup divine. A tablespoon of lemon juice in your pesto brings all the flavors together. People who find vinegar hard to take love lemon juice in their salad dressing, and people on low- or no-salt diets find lemon juice just the thing. The ascorbic acid it contains makes things taste salty.

Laurie Colwin, A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

After a long absence, I have been rereading Laurie Colwin's food writing. It is so delightful and evocative. It makes me want to cook. 

And it surprises me. Mostly because a lemon isn't categorized as a fruit that I'd have considered as an answer. I would have thought of fruit for eating — grapes, strawberries, cantaloupe, even the humble banana. But I would have been wrong.