By Joel Denker
“In my country, we don’t like the yellow one.” My Thai hairdresser and I were talking about the merits of limes and lemons at a Dupont Circle salon.
At Santa Rosa, the Latin seafood restaurant in Adams-Morgan, I asked my waitress about the lime wedge that accompanied my chupe de camarones, a reddish-orange shrimp chowder filled with rice, potatoes, egg, and a small ear of corn. I should squeeze the “limon” in the soup, she said. You mean lime, I responded. She looked baffled.
Instead of words, we talked colors. The “green” one, she told me, was better than the “yellow” because the fruit was more sour.
Sometime later in a Latin grocery, I passed a display of limes with a sign that said “limas.” Another Hispanic shop advertised limones verdes (green lemons).
The saga of the lime is a tale of puzzles. The most delicate member of the citrus family, the thin skinned fruit can easily perish outside a tropical climate. Its cousin, the lemon, is more resilient. The lime tree, a shrubby evergreen with spiny twigs, grows small white flowers. Fragrant oils flow through sacs in its leaves and outer rind.
Native to India and Malaysia, the lime was treasured as much for its spiritual power as for its flavor. In Malaysia, botanist I.H. Burkill points out, limes were given to elephants to make them “sagacious.” Brahmin widows in India, Piero della Valle, a 17th century Italian writer reports, were required to ride once a day around the city, face uncovered, holding a lime in one hand and a mirror in the other.
The Arabs, the preeminent early traders and transplanters of citrus, called the yellow fruit they discovered in India a “laimun.” They often used the same word for lime. When Islamic writers tried to describe the novel fruit, they fell back on familiar language. Abd el-Latif, a 13th century writer, marveled at a “balm lemon of smooth skin the size of a pigeon’s egg.”
The Arabs had brought citrus fruits from India to Arabia in the 9th century. As they expanded into Spain, the Middle East, and Africa, they introduced the fruits to their colonies. The Moors in Spain decorated their towns with tableaus of citrus. “[M]ost of the houses of Seville, not to say all, were abundantly provided with running waters, and spacious courts planted with fruit trees such as the orange, the lemon, the lime,” wrote Ismail Ibe Mohammed al-Shakandi, an Arabic geographer.
The rulers, who infused their own food with a citric fragrance, imparted this lore to their subjects. From the Arabs, the Spanish learned the technique of marinating meats with sour orange and other “acid fruits.”
The lime arrived in the New World with the Spanish and the Portuguese. In the 16th century it was taking hold in the West Indies and in Central America, especially Mexico, which is today the world’s largest producer of the fruit. The formal name for the fruit in Spanish is lima but people commonly used limon to refer to both lemons and limes.
Limes were growing in backyards and wild in thickets in South Florida by the 19th century. After a hurricane and soil depletion killed the pineapple crop in the Florida Keys, growers turned to lime production in 1913. They planted the key lime, the “true lime” as it was called. It was the same fruit as the Mexican and West Indian lime, all of which descended from the original Malaysian and Indian species. They turn yellow as they ripen.
More hurricanes ended lime cultivation in the Keys in 1926. Commercial farmers replaced the key with the Tahiti lime, a hybrid. Unlike the key, it had seeds and was twice its size. Although the Tahiti lacked the exquisitely sour taste of its rival, the fruit was highly marketable, argues food historian Raymond Sokolov. “The Key lime could not hold its own against leather-skinned, easy-to-ship, hardier, seedless, larger but far less delicious . . . limes.” The limes of the Tahiti group dominate the supermarket shelves today.
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To better understand the lime, I sought out restaurant where its flavor was central. Sala Thai, the P Street restaurant, featured dishes from one of the homelands of the “true lime.” (Sala Thai, 2016 P Street, Tel. 872-1144). My shrimp and lemon grass soup, a hot and sour Thai broth, gets its intense sour bite from lime juice, which also invigorates the restaurant’s spicy papaya, shrimp, beef, and other salads. The soup’s “smell,” as important as its taste, is provided by the leaf of another lime species, waitress Prakittaya Changsila tells me. The glossy double leaf, which resembles a bay leaf, comes from a tree that bears a wrinkled fruit the Thais call makrut.
Prakittaya is excited by the sour flavor, which is a keynote of Thai cooking. “The sour taste makes you feel fresh.” Manager Bert Vanavichai adds that the tartness “gives you a good sense. It also makes you want to eat.”
From her elders, the young waitress learned the cosmetic benefits of lime. “Women sometimes mix lime with honey to put on their skin. It makes your skin softer and less oily. It helps with acne.” Her mother would take the makrut fruit from the garden and give her daughter’s hair treatment. “You squeeze the juice on the hair. The natural oil makes your hair black, dark, and shiny.”
A sharp citric flavor permeated my ceviche mixto, one of a long list of cold seafood appetizers offered at Santa Rosa, the seafood house with a Peruvian accent (Santa Rosa Restaurant, 2224 18th Street, Tel. 518-8100, 518-9100). Thin slices of red onion and flecks of coriander accentuated the flavor of the squid, conch, shrimp, and other fish that had been “cooked” in lime juice. The plate came with two Peruvian standards, a slice of potato and a choclo, a small corn cob.
Lime is woven so deeply into the fabric of Latin American food that natives often forget it’s there. I had to prod Andy Chicas, the former seafood salesman who founded Santa Rosa two and a half years ago, to focus on limones verdes. The restaurant, he says, uses the fruit to season “fish, lobster, clams, mussels, oysters.” “We’ve got to cook with limon. That’s the style all over South and Central America.” The lime is also essential to the ritual of drinking beers like Corona and Tecata at Santa Rosa and sparks their pisco sour, a Peruvian brandy cocktail.
Sala Thai manager Vanavichai has sampled the ceviche at the nearby Lauriol Plaza restaurant. “I always go there for that appetizer.” He experienced a familiar acid tang. “Some of the Asian tastes are very close to the Latin American.”
Latin and Thai restaurants share another trait. The Sala Thai menu, like the Santa Rosa’s, refers to “lemon juice” when it means lime juice.
Originally published in The InTowner: http://intowner.com/food-in-the-hood/
