It didn’t just happen overnight. Upon reflection, it’s actually really difficult to pinpoint the time I started to prefer marmalade over jam. Is my palate getting more sophisticated or is it just catering to an overexposed and really hard-working sensory system? I used to watch in wonder as the older members of our community cracked huge quantities of pepper over an egg. Now that’s me.
Not all flavours are enjoyed from a young age. A love of bitter tastes often develops with time. The presence of bitter compounds in foods can often indicate something toxic that should not be ingested, so a young palate avoiding it makes sense: it’s a sort of survival mechanism to stop us eating dangerous elements such as arsenic that present in some foods in the wild. This prompts the question: why am I more drawn to bitter flavours the more I age?
Now is citrus season. In another seeming contradiction, my thoughts of citrus usually involves the beach, Europe and summer sunshine. In Sicily this cake is made using mostly oranges, but I am lucky enough to have access to a diverse range of citrus, so I like to have a mixture. This may become a deep dive, as citrus fruits come in a vast array of varieties. There are hundreds of varieties of oranges alone, which is even more crazy once you learn that the orange itself is a hybrid of two other citrus. The key element when using different types is choose those that are mostly sweet and don’t have too much white pith. In this recipe grapefruit and pomelo, for example, would not work as substitutes.
Looking at the flavours and elements in this recipe, nothing is particularly sweet. The inclusion of olive oil and a bay leaf attest to this and highlight the only sweet element:
the citrus flesh. You can also use other hard herbs such as thyme to create a complex flavour that doesn’t overwhelm the citrus. Bitterness has a place in creating balance, but on its own it may be too confronting. Therefore bittersweet flavours are that contradiction that creates the complexity I really love in such simple dishes.
