We were discussing how wedding presents had changed over the years when a friend recalled the “lemon sets” that were once gifted to every bride and groom in north India. The lemon set was actually a lemonade set — six intricately carved glasses and a carved jug with a curvy spout on a tray.
I can understand why they were so popular. After all, in many parts of the north where the sun is harsh through the year, there is nothing as refreshing as a glass of nimboo paani, or lemonade, whether or not served in a carved glass.
But lemons have their place not just in the north Indian sun. Across India, the fruit has a role to play. It is not only used as a souring agent, but often, along with a bunch of chillies, dangled to ward off the evil eye on doorsteps. And then, of course, we use lemon in our gravies and fish, in our rice and sweets, and in our lemonades and tea.
Memory tree
On second thoughts, it’s not just India either. You may remember Pablo Neruda’s ‘Ode to a lemon’:
Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
But there is reason for Indians to be particularly proud of lemons. The fruit probably originated as a wild species in northeast India, says Toby Sonneman in his book, Lemon: A Global History . The earliest written reference is in a Hindu religious text from before 800 BC, he writes.
“The first citrus trees grew long before there were people to eat their fruit, in a region extending from East Asia to Australia. About twenty million years ago, botanists say, when Asia and Australia were joined as one continent, the three naturally occurring wild species of citrus came into being: mandarin, pomelo and citron,” he writes. “All other forms of citrus we know today — orange, grapefruit, lemon, lime — are hybrids, ancient natural cross-breeds of these three.”
Most of the lemon’s genetic heritage, he adds, comes from the citron. “No one really knows how or why this fruit migrated from India to Media, an ancient country that is now northwestern Iran, then travelled south to Persia... and on to Babylonia, where exiled Jews discovered it and later transported it to Palestine. Alexander the Great’s army, returning from India to Macedonia... carried citrons to the Mediterranean,” the book states.
The history is interesting, but I like the way lemons appear in popular culture too. As kids, we were terrified by a story about a ghost that plucked a lemon from a tree, and how its hand stretched across the air to do so.
And then there was the Trini Lopez song we grew up on.
Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat
My father-in-law had a lemon tree which was not just pretty but bore almost through the year a most fragrant variety called the gondhoraj lebu , or the king-of-fragrances lemon. Everybody loved it, so he made hundreds of cuttings and gave them away to friends and relatives. When he died and they left the house where the lemon tree flourished, the NDMC hacked it to bits.
But his lemon tree lives on — not just in memory, but also in poetry. One of his friends, whom we all called Debu-da, was one of the proud recipients of a cutting. He wrote a poem about it, which was published in a Bengali little magazine soon after my father-in-law’s death. Debu-da (he is now up there with my father-in-law) had titled it ‘ Lebu gaachh ’ — the lemon tree.
The writer likes reading and writing about food as much as he does cooking and eating it. Well, almost.
