The key ingredient: citrus

The sunshine brightness of citrus fruits is one of the cheeriest prospects of winter. Though plenty of summery drinks are enhanced by their sharpness, nothing comes close to the pleasure induced by a pot of mulled wine with a clove-studded orange bobbing around in it on a cold afternoon.

Unless, of course, we invoke duck or chicken in an orange sauce with stem ginger or star anise; lamb cooked with lemons, preserved or fresh, to cut its fat; and a T-bone served as it is in Florence: right off the flames with a squeeze of lemon…

Lemon with fish is, of course, a common pairing, but turn up the volume and cover your ears when lime and anchovy meet each other in Vietnamese and Thai salad dressings and dips.

Pound in a mortar a couple of cloves of garlic, a chilli or two (depending on the asbestos quality of your tongue) and a couple of tablespoons of sugar. Mix in ¼ cup of just-boiled water until the sugar dissolves. Add three tablespoons each of lime juice and fish sauce (the anchovy mentioned above) and a little rice vinegar to balance your nuoc cham. Toss this with shredded cucumber, tomatoes, carrots, spring onion and fresh coriander, mint and basil. For your carnivores, add shredded poached chicken, thinly sliced rare beef or prawns.

I regularly assign oranges a walk-on part in salads with dates, or pecans and dried cranberries; and a starring role with baby spinach, avocado and gently pickled red onions; or with rocket, fennel, black olives and shavings of Parmesan. For a vinaigrette without vinegar, make one using both orange and lemon juices, olive oil and maple syrup.

Lemons were what convinced me as a child to eat broccoli and, squeezed at the last minute over an asparagus or mushroom risotto, their juice lifts the entire experience from something earthy and vegetal to brighter heights. Both oranges and lemons make a hollandaise sauce (though using oranges apparently requires us to call it “sauce Maltaise”). And sweet butternut welcomes the assertiveness of lemon or lime, whether roasted together or combined in a soup made creamy with coconut milk.

I haven’t mentioned marmalade because my beloved hates it. But even he capitulated when a friend brought us a lime mojito jam. Someone once told me that mojitos, where the sour fragrant lime and refreshing sharp mint are crossed with the jolt of rum and a sugar rush, are the intersection of amphetamines and aromatherapy. Maybe this explains his temporary lack of resistance. But I digress. Use marmalade to glaze a ham and Dr Seuss will rejoice at the idea of ham with jam.

Whenever I bake, I am seduced by the freshness of citrus to close a meal. The 18th century definition of “zest” was keen enjoyment, and it is in citrus peel where most of its flavour resides. Zest oranges, lemons, or limes finely using a Microplane and massage the oils into sugar. Use this sugar, now redolent of citrus, in your polenta or almond or poppy seed cakes, or in curds for tarts or meringue pies.

But importantly, citrus is best in an emergency. Having reunited with a collection of Kingsley Amis’ essays on drink stuck away on a high shelf during lockdown, I turned to his Salty Dog and raised many a glass during those dark months in defiance of a government who thought it best we not drink at all. “Moisten the rim of a glass,” he says, “and twirl it about in a saucer of table salt, so that it picks up a thickish coating about a quarter or an inch deep. Carefully add one part gin and two parts fresh grapefruit juice, stir thoroughly; add ice, stir again, and drink through the band of salt.”