lemon yellow, from winter to spring

I don't know about you, but I have always associated lemon with summer. Fresh, vibrant, and sharp, it seemed to embody all that you crave when it's numbingly warm and sticky, as it usually is in summer in Tokyo. But as many of you know, lemon is actually a fruit of winter, just as almost all citrus fruits are - although it doesn't thrive in cold climates. And now I think about it, the sun-kissed lemon coming from somewhere warm when you are coping with bitter coldness may be a blessing, something that helps you go through the last few months of winter and look for spring.




At the end of January this year, I ordered a 5-kilo (11-lb) case of organic lemons, fresh and ripe, shipped straight from a tiny island on the inland sea in Hiroshima where they are grown.

In the past, lemons you buy in Japan were almost always imported. More and more domestically-produced lemons, mostly from the southwest part of the country where the climate is mild, have become readily available over the last decade or so. Nowadays you can buy them at many supermarkets even in the countryside, including ones in my neighborhood.


Here I wanted a LOT of them for my purpose, so I went ahead and got them by the case - quite a change from the usual pack I get at the store that contains 2-3 lemons! (Pictured together are yuzu from Kochi and kumquats from Miyazaki I had around the same time.)

The reason why I wanted a lot of lemons was to make our own limoncello. During my last visit in Italy last spring, my friend Sigrid had me very well looked after, and saw me off with loads of Italian goodies for me to take with. One of them was her Italian mother-in-law's homemade limoncello.


I brought it back home and shared with my folks, and we were all blown away - it was strong but smooth, sweet but not cloying, and bursting with lemon flavor. My mother in particular loved it so much we begged Sigrid to ask her mother-in-law to share her recipe with us. She has very kindly done so - in a form of hand-written (!) recipe, which Sigrid translated into English for us.


As far as home-made liqueurs go, the most common kind we use here in Japan is what we call "white liquor", a 35% alcohol neutral grain spirit. As the recipe we received did not specify the type of alcohol to use (it was simply mentioned as "alcohol"), I did a bit of research myself, and found that limoncello is typically made with spirits with much higher content of alcohol. The limoncello Sigrid gave to us was also very strong.

So for our limoncello I got myself a few bottles of spirytus, a 96%(!!) alcohol rectified spirit, as well as our staple 35% stuff. Our plan was to make two batches using the two different kinds of spirit, and see how they each turn out. We also prepared a batch with yuzu in place of lemon and spirytus.


The recipe itself was simple enough; let wafer-thin strips of lemon zest steep in alcohol for a week, filter, combine with syrup and leave it to sit for some months. It called for quite a lot of lemons (hence my 5-kilo case) - more precisely, zest of a lot of lemons. At the end of the first step (combining zest with spirit) we were left with 20 lemons (and six or so yuzu), sans zest but otherwise whole.


So I spent the next couple of days busy using them up....