How to make orange juice|Best Orenge Food

How to make orange juice

Dutch still-life painters adored lemons. Seventeenth-century

artists such as Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz. Heda painted

hundreds of them, luminous renderings using multiple layers

of vivid pigments and glazes. A whole lemon casts an ovoid

of sunlight upon a pewter plate. Gleaming slices of lemon

and cut lemon halves accompany fish, oysters and meat pies.

Giant curls of lemon peel accompany wine-filled goblets,

glasses and gilt cups.

Strikingly, the lemons in these paintings are always prom -

inent, never insignificant. Placed in the foreground, painted

with sensual delicacy and a kind of reverence, they cast a

golden light close to the viewer, as if to seduce the gaze.

Today the lemon might seem ordinary, but in seven-

teenth-century Europe it was anything but. Starting in the

late eleventh century, Crusaders had brought back citrus

and other desirable goods from the East and in much of

Europe lemons remained both costly and coveted for cen-

turies. At a Westminster Hall banquet given for Henry 

and Anne Boleyn in , among the luxuries gracing the

table was a single lemon, which had cost six silver pennies.

Even in , when a dozen ‘unwasht’ lemons could be pur-

chased in a London market for three shillings, they were far



exotic spices or lemons, he could still in a sense lay claim to

these objects by displaying a still-life painting of them in his

home. Tens of thousands of seventeenth-century still-lifes

fulfilled just such desires.

Those who could afford lemons found spirited pleasure

in the zest, a flavour so uplifting that in medieval times physi-

cians prescribed it as an antidote for melancholy (the word

‘zest’ retains this association with lively enjoyment). The Dutch

and Flemish often flavoured wine and spirits with lemon zest,

much like today’s citrus-flavoured vodkas and gins. Their still-

life paintings captured this trend too, placing lemons near

wine-filled goblets or glasses. Typically, the lemon is peeled

to midpoint in a continuous ribbon still attached to the fruit,

and often a twist of peel curls down the tablecloth, a coil of

golden light.

Lemons also featured in the seventeenth-century fash-

ion for edible decoration. ‘Jagged lemons’, round, notched

slices of unpeeled fruit, garnished a whole fish, lobster or

crab, a joint of mutton or a roast pigeon, quail or lark. Round

‘lemmon’ slices and lemon halves pricked with rosemary

branches accessorized a  ‘grand salad’, alternating with

quartered roasted eggs around the plate’s rim. A French cook-

book of  suggested lemon salad, an arrangement of

thinly sliced peeled lemons topped with sugar, orange and

pomegranate blossoms. Pickled lemon peel brightened winter

salads, such as ‘A Sallet of Lemmon, Caveer [caviar], Ancho -

vies, and other of that nature’, advised by William Rabisha in

The Whole Body of Cookery Dissected, published in London in

, ‘to corroborate the palate, and cause appetite’.

The idea of a sweet ‘after-course’, considered an antidote

to the banquet’s overindulgence, was as yet confined to the

wealthy. Expensive imported sugar, long associated with

lemon, was still out of reach for ordinary people, and thus

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