The Most Important Seasoning After Salt and Pepper

So often the answer is … lemon. The questions, though, vary greatly.

I’ve learned this over the course of many years, but I was acutely reminded of it last month (or was it the month before?) when I was trying to focus on the core of a dish (salmon? butter beans?) but actually wanted to talk about lemons. Just lemons. There is an irresistibility to them, a hypnotic quality that grabs my attention sneakily yet fully. With lemons around, what else is there to cook with, really? Or to talk about?

Recipe: Smoky Confit Tomato and Lemon Pasta

What makes lemons so intoxicating to me is their tendency to both sit in the background and fundamentally (and deliciously) transform whatever they are paired with. The two key components — the skin and the juicy flesh — are responsible for that. A piece of zest added while sautéing my sofrito for ragout, say, or a chicken casserole, or a lentil soup, or anything, will linger with a fragrance that I can never miss. A squeeze of juice at the very end adds just the kind of punch that I do miss. (Today’s recipe sticks to only that zest, because tomatoes normally have enough acidity in them to give my pasta a nice sharpness. But extra juice would definitely not hurt, particularly if your tomatoes are extra sweet.)

The interactions between the flesh and the skin get even more interesting at the next level, when I make preserved lemons, giving the skin and the flesh weeks to interact, with the addition of lots of salt. This lemon perfume — for me, the distilled essence of lemon — is what gives Moroccan dishes so much of their particularity. It’s also the opening recipe to Paula Wolfert’s “The Food of Morocco,” which I can’t recommend enough, and a key ingredient in many of my favorite dishes to cook: a warm potato salad, charred green beans, baked mushrooms, chicken tagine or any other chicken.