Nigel Slater’s recipes for potatoes with sherry, and lemon and bergamot curd
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Two kinds of zesty citrus celebration to brighten any winter’s day. The kitchen is aglow with citrus fruit. The lemons came with their wide, glossy leaves intact. Oranges, their skin flashed with viridian at the stem and sporting thin, pointed leaves, smelled of their own blossom. A box of wrinkled green makrut limes, warty and beautiful, now sit waiting to be grated into a green curry sauce. There is even a handful of bergamots, the yellow-green lemons whose tantalisingly perfumed zest I will use in a pot of citrine yellow curd.
![[Nigel Slater]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2017/10/09/Nigel_Slater,-L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The tight-skinned citrus varieties, such as the neat clementines and larger, almost perfectly round Valencias, are inevitably the juiciest and a world away from the watery flavour of the easypeel varieties with baggy skins. Bergamot lemons and yuzu are a rare find, but worth tracking down during their brief season in midwinter. The juice of the bergamot is peppery with a kick of sherbet about it and is best used in tandem with that of a classic lemon. On its own, its sourness and spice is almost too much. Even a small amount will pucker your lips and prickle your tongue.
![[‘Organic lemons, or those that have not been coated in wax, are pretty much essential here’: lemon and bergamot curd.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ea42ee450ea9985fcacbc0661d6cae7226879eb7/0_2025_5199_3120/master/5199.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
I used a little of the Spanish orange’s juice in a dressing for roasted potatoes with chilli and plump golden raisins. A little zest, finely grated, wouldn’t have gone amiss either. Later, I whisked up a couple of pots of deeply perfumed lemon curd. The scent was that of lemon and also of the bergamots.
The most everyday of the winter citrus is probably the blood orange. Once rare, my fridge is rarely without them during the winter months. The ruby-fleshed fruits are something for juicing, but also for slicing and tossing with crisp-skinned pork or duck, probably as a Monday lunch with the remains of Sunday’s roast. A watercress salad with blood oranges and toasted almonds is something I can never get enough of.
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