Author Archives: Shannon

What Puts the Key in the Lime?

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key lime pieFlorida is a good place to contemplate important matters of nature like the mating habits of bottlenose dolphins (colorful) and the take-off techniques of loons (unfortunate). On a recent trip to visit my parents, I also found myself thinking about the mysterious fruit, the key lime. Even though I spent many of the Christmas vacations of my childhood throwing fish heads to pelicans on Marathon Key, I believed that key lime pie was just lime pie that you ate in the Keys. I’m not sure it fully sunk in that the key lime is actually a fruit unique from the Persian lime (also known as the gin and tonic lime, at least to me). Here are some fun key lime facts:

  1. They’re not green. Or rather, the ones you should be eating are not green. The ripe ones are bright yellow.
  2. Most of them don’t come from the keys, at least not since the 1926 hurricane that wiped out most of the lime groves of Florida. Now we get key limes from Mexico.
  3. They’re native to Southeast Asia, so I was probably eating them all the time in Cambodia in place of Persian limes without ever realizing it.
  4. They’ve been known to cause phytophotodermatitis upon contact, making human skin extra sensitive to light. No word on how long this effect lasts, but it sounds like bad news for sunburned tourists in a tropical climate.
  5. They are smaller and seedier than their Persian brethren, and their flavor is more tart and bitter.

Okay, so none of those facts make them sound terribly appealing, particularly the last two. But because they have a stronger flavor, you don’t need much juice to get a strong limey flavor, which makes them ideal for cooking.

I suspect, though, that the real reason that key limes and the pies they go into are so popular is because we associate them with sunshine and sand and Ernest Hemingway and pelicans and fish heads. They’re a vacation on a plate. I mean, look how happy this guy looks. Continue reading →

Easter Peeps and Mucilaginous Root Pulp

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marsh mallow

Althaea officinalis (or Mother of All Peeps)

Ah, the glorious Easter baskets of yore, that would come to the rescue just as last year’s Halloween candy had dwindled to nothing but Bit O’ Honeys! Among the jellybeans and Cadbury eggs there was always at least one box of Peeps, those Technicolor chicken- and rabbit-shaped marshmallows. In my house, however, they were always destined to play second fiddle to the painstakingly nibbled chocolate rabbit and they usually ossified into little chick-shaped rocks before I got around to eating them. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began to understand the beauty of the Peep.

There are a lot of Peep haters out there, my husband among them, probably because they taste like nothing, really, beyond enamel-destroying sweet, but their origins are arguably the most noble of any Easter basket classic. While poking around on FoodTimeline.org, I noticed that marshmallows shared the same origin date, 2000 B.C., as apples. Yes, you read that correctly. Proto-peeps are as old as apples! (I’m not too clear, actually, if 2000 B.C. is the date of the first wild apple or merely the first time apples were cultivated by humans for food, but still…).

Marshmallows are called such because of the marsh mallow, a wild plant that ancient people ate in many forms. You can eat the flowers, you can eat the greens like lettuce or you can boil the roots to obtain a “mucilaginous substance.” This substance was used as a cough remedy, but there’s also evidence that as early as 2000 B.C., Egyptians were mixing the mallow mucous with honey to make a sweet confection, reserved for royalty and gods. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you Peep haters. Continue reading →