Citrus: Arts and Traditions of the Table Series

by Professor Pierre Laszlo

Walk into your local grocery store and down the produce aisle, and you’ll find a dazzling array of citrus, from navel oranges and clementines to grapefruit and key limes—and sometimes even more exotic fare like the Japanese yuzu, the baboon lemon, or the Ugli fruit, whose thick, wrinkly rind lends it its name. Nearly 100 million tons of citrus are produced globally every year, and in Florida alone, citriculture is a 9 billion dollar industry. But where did these fruits first come from? How did they find their way into the Western world? And how did they become both a culinary and cultural phenomenon?Pierre Laszlo here traces the spectacular rise and spread of citrus across the from Southeast Asia in 4000 BC through North Africa and the Roman Empire to early modern Spain and Portugal, whose explorers introduced the fruits to the Americas during the 1500s. Blending scientific rigor with personal curiosity, Citrus ransacks over two millennia of world history, exploring the numerous roles that citrus has played in agriculture, horticulture, cooking, nutrition, religion, and art—from the Jewish feast of the Tabernacles through the gardens and courts of Versailles to the canvasses of Vincent van Gogh to the orange groves of southern California and the juicing industry of today.Tropicana, Goethe, Matisse, Thomas Jefferson, the British Royal Navy—and, of course, citrus, all come into play in this wide-ranging but remarkably pithy book. A dazzling display of erudition, Citrus is popular science at its most compelling, history at its most searching—and a surprising page-turner.

Genres: History, Food, Nonfiction, Food and Drink

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 2007

Reviews

[Lorilin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a botany class I'm taking, and the book is surprisingly interesting. It's more of a story, a conversation, about citrus, instead of just straight facts or growing information. The author throws in some autobiographical details (since he has travelled a lot and has first-hand knowledge of some of this stuff), but it's never so much that I was annoyed. Overall, a fun little read about citrus.

[Kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Plenty of interesting information but a bit of a dry read.

[Ben Orlin]

I was sold on this one by the blurb: "A delectable marmalade of a book." Actually, not the blurb itself, but the blurber's name: Oliver Sacks.

I don't just want to read what Sacks wrote. I want to read what Sacks read. I look at his exquisitely overwritten prose, his enchantment with human experience, and I think, "I'll have what he's having."

In this case, what he's having is a dense and eclectic book: 65% history, 10% memoir, 10% art criticism, 10% recipes, and 5% tantalizing little flashes of chemistry (the author's area of expertise). It is hard to leave such a meal wholly satisfied; you enjoy some of these ingredients more than others, and wish the book catered more to your tastes. More juice, less rind. (Or vice versa, if you're into citrus zests.)

Still, my personal highlights:

1. The botanist (p. 42) whose nose was so finely tuned that he correctly guessed the ancestry of the Ugli fruit from its scent alone.

2. The Parisian restaurant (p. 50) that attaches serial numbers to its servings of duck a l'orange, so that each can be tracked and recorded. Number 53,211 was eaten in 1921 by Emperor Showa.

3. The tale (p. 105) of orange juice companies adulterating their "100% juice" products with corn syrup and beet sugar, using secret systems of pipes to conceal the cheat from inspectors.

4. The supremely simple and quite tasty recipe (p. 109) for "avocado with lime juice": just those two ingredients mixed together, then sweetened with sugar into a surprisingly satisfying dessert.

5. The chemical fact (p. 123) that one molecule smells like oranges, and its chiral mirror image smells of lemons.

6. This historical tidbit (p. 157): expertly made French tapestries of the 1400s showed orange blossoms with four-fold symmetry, rather than their true five-fold symmetry. This suggests that the creators had never seen actual orange blossoms.

7. The author's contrast between Dutch and Spanish still lifes (p. 159-161). The meticulous realism of the Dutch aimed to celebrate the society's newly acquired wealth. The vivid forms of the Spanish were more about finding a sensuous spirituality in objects.

8. The fact that the author loves citrus crate labels so much, he devoted several pages (167-174) to their analysis. I found these pages themselves rather boring, but I'm charmed that he wrote them.

9. Other dessert recipes I intend to try: fried Valencia oranges (p. 35) orange sherbert (p. 91), candied citrus strips (p. 179), orange mousse (p. 193).

So, am I reading like Oliver Sacks? Alas, I suspect not. The things that enchant me are not those that would have enchanted him. But this is the benefit of a sampler platter, a basket of mixed fruits such as this one. You're sure to find flavors you enjoy... and you can skip the ones you don't.

[Arlian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely disappointing. First of, his writing style was overly florid and annoying for my tastes, so I was inclined to less-than-love the book simply because of that, but I am a sucker for a well researched history book, so I could have easily overlooked my stylistic preferences in favour of an illuminating read. Alas, I didn't get that either. The book is not a coherent linear narrative at all. Instead, the book is divided into chapters that focus on one "aspect" of citrus and it's relation to the world, as defined by the author. Each chapter takes a topic, such as citrus' introduction to the new world, citrus in poetry, etc, and the author pontificates on that topic. Again, not in a particularly cohesive way, either. He like to randomly insert food and drink recipes in the middle of other narratives. I would be interested in a chapter devoted to recipes, not inserting a recipe in narrative about Brazil, even if it is a "Brazilian" recipe. Besides all that, the author also has a lot of opinions he wants to share with us, that have nothing to do with the history of citrus, or even citrus directly. He's pro government (and includes a narrative that shows how "good" government is because if the government hadn't stepped in to destroy some citrus trees, canker would have killed them all anyway, so we sure are lucky! He makes sure to tell us how lucky we are, and how grateful we should be to government several times.). Which is all well and good but has nothing to do with citrus. He also likes to tell us how awesome GMO's are and how lucky we are going to be when we really figure out how to use them. While I do have specific ideas about both those things (against), I'm not opposed to an author conveying an opinion that is different than mine-if he does so in a coherent, well thought out manner, as opposed to randomly interjecting these thoughts into chapters where they are only tangentially related and clearly just an excuse to pontificate about the authors beliefs, rather than an attempt to communicate any facts. And lastly, the author talks to much about himself, his travels, his personal life, and his food preferences for my tastes. I wanted to know about citrus, not why the author hates rutabagas. There was only one chapter I found truly enjoyable and interesting, and that is the one about bottling and producing juice. The chapter on citrus in poetry was...ugh. Painful. I skipped it, and the following chapter, entirely.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the chemistry, economics, history and politics of citriculture. Lazslo is a chemist and we learn about such things as geraniol and terpineol and limonen, however, he also supplies recipes for fried oranges, key lime pie and the incomparable Brazilian drink the caipirinha. The narrative thrust is not strong and there is some loss of the main story in the anecdotes but over all I enjoyed it. Picking it up and reading chapters between others books is a good way to read it.

[Pancha · Rating 1 out of 5]

The narrative seems a little scattered, I think because the memoir aspect keeps getting tangled up with the history part. In the end, it wasn't what I expected, and while there were nuggets of interesting facts, I didn't feel like digging through the text to find them.

[Brian]

Just started to read this week.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good history of the citrus industry in the US, jumps around a lot though

[Stacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great gift for foodies ...

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very brief coverage of blood oranges.