Ingredients · Fruit

Lemon

Citrus × limon · Rutaceae (citrus family)

Lemon
Dried lemon — the fruit, the powder and the dried juice, as distinct from the dried peel sold separately as a spice. The difference is real: peel is aroma with no acid, while dried lemon and lemon powder bring the sourness too, which is what makes a cup taste refreshing rather than merely perfumed. Ten products carry one of these forms, split across the tea side and the spice shelf.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndia (probable origin)
TasteSharp, clean sourness with bright citrus aroma; the acid is what distinguishes it from lemon peel

How to use it

In iced tea and fruit infusions, where the acid is the point. Lemon powder in dry rubs and seasoning blends, where fresh juice would wet them. In baking. A pinch will lift a dish that tastes flat but is already salted.

With food

Fish and chicken. Butter and cream. Honey. Ginger. Berries. Olive oil. Artichoke and asparagus. Black pepper.

With spices

Black pepper. Ginger. Dill. Thyme and rosemary. Sumac. Coriander seed.

With tea

Ceylon black tea, the classic iced-tea pairing. Earl Grey. Green tea. Lemon balm, lemongrass and lemon verbena, its herbal namesakes.

Its story

Where it comes from

The lemon's origin is not settled — northwestern and northeastern India have both been proposed for the first millennium BC. It was growing in Iraq and Egypt by 700 AD, in Sicily before 1000, and Arab growers spread it through the Mediterranean between 1000 and 1150. Large-scale European growing began around Genoa in the fifteenth century. No lot origin is named in our notes.

What happened

The lemon's most consequential chapter is naval, and it has an unpleasant tail. Sailors on long voyages died of scurvy — Vasco da Gama lost 116 of 170 men in 1499. In 1747, aboard HMS Salisbury, the naval surgeon James Lind divided twelve scorbutic sailors into six pairs and gave each pair a different treatment; oranges and lemons were the most effectual remedies, in what is recognised as one of the earliest controlled trials in medicine. In 1795 the Admiralty made lemon juice and sugar a daily ration, and British sailors became limeys — though what they drank for a long time was Mediterranean lemon, not lime. The tail is this: economists have argued that the Sicilian Mafia first appeared in exactly the citrus country around Palermo where that new demand created high profits in a place with weak rule of law, standing between growers and exporters. A doctor there who tried to sack his warden had the replacement shot dead, fled to Naples, and wrote to Rome that of eight hundred people in his district there had been twenty-three killings in 1874 alone.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

Explore

Other ways in

Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip