Swap out regular lemons for preserved ones in your go-to recipes for roast chicken and fish or grilled meats. For an easy weeknight meal, toss pasta with some good olive oil, a little garlic, and chopped preserved lemon peel. Impress your friends at brunch by mixing a little of the zesty preserving liquid into Bloody Marys and swirling chopped peel into yogurt with a little honey. And impress them again at dinner by adding a twist on the peel in your Martini. Use preserved lemons to liven up potato or grain salads, or to enhance your salad dressing, hummus, or even, Admony suggests, guacamole. Solomonov even likes to freeze his, then grate the peel for granita. (He also adds a pro tip: Don’t toss the leftover preserving liquid. Instead, “sprinkle it on vegetables or fish before baking. It ups the ante and brings out all of its surrounding flavors.”) Or follow North African tradition and simply put a bowlful out on the dinner table—it might just become your newest favorite condiment.

From there, the options are manifold. In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee suggests that a solution of 5 to 10% salt is needed to achieve a good North African–style preserved lemon. (As a reference, olives call for the same percentage.) A proper Indian pickled lemon calls for double that amount, as well as turmeric, fenugreek seeds, and chili powder. Or take a tip from Sortun, who encourages you to make a batch with fragrant, sweet Meyer lemons when they’re in season. You can also add cloves, mustard seed, or mace—just a few of the spices popularized by the British in the 19th century. Meanwhile, Admony uses a 70% salt to 30% sugar mix and adds chili and paprika, for a smoky, spicy twist, and turmeric, for color. She also lets her lemons ferment for a full three months. But if you’re in a hurry, Paula Wolfert has a five-day pickled method. Admony notes that she’s “even seen some chefs make a sous vide version in 12 hours,” which, she laughs, isn’t as good as the real thing, but certainly works in a pinch.

Three months—or even one—may seem like quite the time investment, but being, well, preserved, the cured lemons will last in the back of your fridge for up to a year. And a little goes a very long way to adding that touch of umami and an alluring depth to your cooking.

You don’t need to become an expert at couscous or find room in your kitchen for a stoneware tagine to make use of preserved lemons. Pluck one from the jar, rinse it off, and add it to everything that calls for lemon—and everything that doesn’t. (As Paula Wolfert notes in her headnote on preserved lemons, “fresh lemons are never an adequate substitute” in recipes that call for the preserved variety, though preserved lemons are a fine—perhaps better!—substitute in recipes calling for fresh.)

She also lets her lemons ferment for a full three months. But if you’re in a hurry, Paula Wolfert has a five-day pickled method. Admony notes that she’s “even seen some chefs make a sous vide version in 12 hours,” which, she laughs, isn’t as good as the real thing, but certainly works in a pinch.

Depending on your neighborhood, or how far you’re willing to travel, you can likely buy a jar of preserved lemons ready to eat. It’s just as easy, however, to make them yourself. The simplest and most delicious method calls for nothing more than lemons, salt, and patience (our own take also adds a touch of sugar for sweetness). It goes like this: Start with a handful of lemons. Cut each fruit into quarters lengthwise, without slicing through the base, and transfer them to a large bowl, tossing them with salt (and sugar, if using), before covering and refrigerating them overnight. The next day, the lemons will have released quite a bit of liquid, and you can transfer the entire contents of the bowl to a canning jar, pressing the lemons down firmly until they’re completely submerged. Seal the jar tightly and store it in a cool place for a month or longer—this is one of those things that get even better with age. The result is a lemon with a velvety peel and an intense yet mellow lemony character—whose “texture is soft and flavor is deep,” says Sortun.

Over the past thousand years, these salt-cured lemons have made a meandering journey north and west, joining the cuisines of Israel, Iran, Turkey, and India. But it wasn’t until far more recently that they began to appear in English-language cookbooks. Though there are cursory mentions in 18th-century texts, like The Experienced English Housekeeper, preserved lemons were most likely introduced to American audiences in the mid-1970s, through Paula Wolfert’s James Beard Hall of Fame cookbook, Couscous and Other Good Food From Morocco, and Claudia Roden’s subsequent A Book of Middle Eastern Food.

And yet, despite making their way into some American pantries 40-odd years ago, they have retained their aura of exoticism in the United States. Admony laughs as she tells the story of how, when she moved to New York in 1999 to work at Tabla, she showed her Tunisian-cum-Israeli style of preserved lemons to the restaurant’s celebrated chef, Floyd Cardoz—in her estimation, a master of spices—and his kitchen staff “had no clue; they had never seen them before.”

Once Upon a Lemon
A glass clamp jar with lemons and salt, the ingredients for making preserved lemons.
Clara Inés Schuhmacher
Originally, lemons were preserved for the same reason all things are preserved—to store and eat them past their season. Mary Ellen Snodgrass, author of the Encyclopedia of Kitchen History, traces their earliest reference to an 11th-century account of Arab Mediterranean cuisine (that is, cuisine from Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco). An actual recipe surfaces in the 12th-century Egyptian treatise On Lemon, Its Drinking and Use, by the Arabic-speaking court physician Ibn Jumay. Jumay’s recipe, now some nine centuries old, is almost exactly the recipe of today. According to Toby Sonneman’s Lemon: A Global History, the recipe called for “slitting the fruit and filling the gashes with salt, then pressing them into a jar, covering with lemon juice and letting them ferment for weeks.”

While you’re most likely to find preserved lemons in traditional preparations—Algerian couscous dishes fragrant with olives and raisins, Indian curries, Tunisian chickpea stews, and, yes, the Moroccan chicken tagine—they’re a worthy addition to a wide spectrum of meals.

Boston chef Ana Sortun has a name for that: lemon umami. “Preserved lemons add a fermented quality that a regular lemon would not,” she says. Sortun, who first encountered preserved lemons when she worked for the Tunisian-born chef Moncef Meddeb some 22 years ago, was so taken with the condiment, and Eastern Mediterranean cooking in general, that she opened her own restaurant, Oleana, to honor the cuisine. Chef Michael Solomonov, best known for his landmark Philadelphia restaurant Zahav, agrees: “Sometimes it just doesn’t cut it to squeeze a lemon on top of a dish, and that’s when preserved lemons come into play. They add a big punch of flavor: heavy citrus, heavy floral notes from the oils in the peel, and ultimately heavy umami. It’s that extra something in the background of a dish that piques your curiosity.”

Israeli-born chef Einat Admony, of the Middle Eastern restaurant Balaboosta, in New York, is similarly effusive in her praise. For her, preserved lemons are, simply, “insane.” So much so that she “literally uses them in everything.”

So what is this lemon that is not quite a lemon—that is more than a lemon? Let’s take a look.

Preserved lemons add a huge punch of citrus and umami flavor that ordinary lemons can’t match. Here’s how to start incorporating them into your cooking, or make your own preserved lemons at home.
Fresh lemons are a workhorse in my kitchen, finding their way into everything from ice cream and tarts, to bitters and homemade cheese, to my go-to household cleaner. In fact, I thought I’d pretty much exhausted my uses for lemons—that is, until a fall afternoon in 2006, when I met a friend for lunch at the then-new-to-me Café Mogador in New York’s East Village. She knowingly ordered us matching chicken tagines without even glancing at the menu. The dish was unlike anything I had ever tasted: intensely lemony, with a depth I couldn’t place. It was so much more than the lemon chicken it appeared to be on the plate. I later learned that its unique flavor came from preserved lemons, which added an irresistible complexity to an otherwise straightforward chicken.

Mutura, mara, smokies, and other Kenyan street foods rely on very strict market bases: First, they rely on the evening crowd, people on their way home from work, who buy them before they get back to the house for their real food; then, they rely on the folks out drinking, saa za ulevi (when people are drinking), which is why a lot of mutura is usually sold near bars. The curfew in effect in Kenya means that mutura sellers have a window of an hour, maybe two, in which to sell off their stock. This, coupled with the fact that people are rushing to get home, means that for many mutura sellers, it isn’t worth the risk.

The first big sociological change in the consumption of mutura in Kenya was driven by the British colonial government’s employment and housing policies, which transformed mutura from being a mostly ceremonial and religious food for the Gikuyu into one of the country’s main street foods. Now, I wonder if mutura is one of the things to which COVID-19 will bring permanent change. Will more people start ordering mutura online, to be delivered into their houses? Will people start making and grilling mutura from the comfort of their homes? Will mutura places become hygienic places, with handwashing stations, and utensils being washed, and mutura served as if in a proper restaurant, even though clean mutura isn’t mutura? Me, I don’t know.

This is what I know: I miss mutura. I miss the easy banter at the mutura place, people talking about their lives, maybe football, maybe how they are going to go out that night. I miss the mutura sellers flirting with some of their customers, cutting them mutura in lieu of verbal flirting. I miss the babas who come in with their big cars and their big bellies, park by the side of the road, and order mutura for 200 bob because big man, big food. I miss the little kids who come in, feeding on a new taste, and the other customers shouting at the seller not to add chile, because these are kids, can you not see? I miss my friend, M., calling me, asking if I’m in the house, and driving over so that we can go to my mutura base, where he will say such things as, “Mutura is like sex.”

However, its illicit appeal can work against it. To some, it is non grata for a number of reasons: because of poor hygiene practices among mutura sellers; because “do you even know what’s in it?”; because of the myriad risks one takes with every bite of mutura; because of the idea that mutura is “poor-people food”; because of every manner of logical and pseudo-logical argument against its intake. Indeed, as my friend W. tells me, “I think the idea of it ruined the taste before I could even give it a chance.”

It wasn’t always so. In its autochthonic form among the Agikuyu community, mutura occupied a place of honor, as Jmburus describes on his blog, in talking about goat-eating traditions among the Agikuyu. Mutura was prepared only during special occasions, such as ruracios (dowry-payment ceremonies) and weddings. It was prepared by men, but only women were supposed to eat it; the men would eat the other parts of the slaughtered animal.

Then, the other rules of eating mutura. Fatty mutura, you can’t eat it when it’s cold. All mutura, you eat with your hands, not with a fork. Custom allows the use of a toothpick sometimes, but only reluctantly. The little ones at the mutura place, you feed them first. You always call for another round (“niongeze nyingine”) regardless of any prior predilections. And, finally, the best mutura is the one eaten in the cold, after a long hike on the foothills of one of the many mountains that skirt the Rift Valley, in a little hut where the kikuyu flies over your head, with a steaming cup of soup to which the chile you’ll add gives it that perfect monster kick.

Here’s a story: Last year, walking in town with N., we bumped into Eddie B. Listen, I told N., this guy, Eddie B., he’s the one who introduced me to mutura. This happened in Kisumu, in ‘07. That year there was post-election violence in Kisumu, sawa, people’s houses being burnt, businesses being looted, protestors being shot in the streets, but there was also mutura, and the illicit joys and pleasures it carried.

Of course, these illicit joys and pleasures are a risk. Apart from the choirs of bacteria allegedly present in mutura, the mutura vendors rarely have cashiers to handle money, and so the hands that serve you mutura are the same ones that handle currency all evening long. This leads to consumers opting for products that, while similar to mutura, don’t carry the same risks. Data scientist Chris Orwa argues that, “The product came into existence to serve a need—the need to provide a protein source for low-income earners—and it quickly became popular with dwellers of informal settlement due to the low price point (Kshs. 10) and the need to bridge a dietary deficiency. For a long time, this market segment existed without any competition and, in fact, became a de-facto standard for low-priced meat products. Then came in the big brand name, “Farmer’s Choice,” with its “smokie” sausages that are not only tastier but also rival the price point of mutura (at Kshs. 15). Not only that, the new “smokie” vendors have more hygienic equipment and with that hygiene and the brand reputation of Farmer’s Choice comes a sense of trust that is lacking in the case of mutura.”

Some kachumbari sprinkled on top, for the culture. The tomatoes in the kachumbari are loud, as are the onions, and the coriander, and more chiles, but not overloud, and they and the mutura, instead of rushing into and attacking each other, overlap rather as the pages of an atlas expire into each other at their edges. I eat, we eat, all of us, our big happy mutura family.

Yesterday, I got out of the house, in search of mutura. All my places were closed. It was six, and people were rushing home to beat the curfew, which starts at seven, everyone with a face mask over their mouth. I walked. No mutura. Walked some more. Still no mutura. I walked some more. Near my neighborhood, there is a sea of open-air garages. There, in the middle of the garages, surrounded by cars on all sides, were two mutura sellers. Around both of them, a clergy of mutura seekers, each with their face masks slipped down to their chins, munching on mutura. I walked over.

Cutting mutura is an art. Mr. Mutura Server selects a roll of mutuch, lifts it off the fire, and onto the board next to the stove. Next, he approximates forty shillings worth of the stuff, cuts it off and returns the rest to the flame. He then slices it, each piece roughly the size of a plastic bottle cap, each piece brown and sizzling. The surface of the mutura, nicely dried, is a darkly browned crust, slightly charred, contrasting with the crumbly meat underneath. In your mouth, it crumbles, the innards spicy with a slightly greasy flavor, the fat soft and succulent and rich, and the garlic and cilantro and scallions and chile giving you an ambrosial kick. Around you the smoke from the mutura on the grill rises, flooring you. I think of Edward Lee, who, in Smoke & Pickles, writes, “Some say umami is the fifth [taste], in addition to salty, sweet, sour and bitter. I say smoke is the sixth.”

Now, things are different. Now, Nairobi is shut down because of COVID-19. Travel in and out of the city is banned, and there’s a countrywide curfew from dusk to dawn. Social distancing regulations announced by the government early during Kenya’s infection mean that restaurants and eateries remain closed, unless they meet stringent health requirements.

I walk around my neighborhood in the evenings. All the mutura joints are closed. I call Clifton, ask him if he’s been able to eat mutura ever since all of this began.

“No,” he tells me. “All my usual guys are closed.”

We talk some more. “Usually these guys open late in the afternoon, saa za ulevi,” he says. “But now with the curfew, they have a very small window in which to sell the stock.”

Nevertheless, we go on. We mutura lovers persist.

I go to my mutura place.

“Niekee ya forty,” I tell my mutura guy.

The Joy of Eating Mutura, Nairobi’s Blood Sausage of Ill Repute
Mutura, a Kenyan spiced goat sausage enriched with the blood, has a complicated history and a controversial reputation. But to love mutura is to love the culture that surrounds it.

Mutura—viz., a fire-grilled delicacy made from goat and/or cow and/or lamb intestines sewn together and stuffed with a mixture bound by fresh blood (and, among the Maasai, laced with fat that melts when you grill it)—is part of the global tradition of blood sausages. Ireland has black pudding, France has boudin noir, South Korea has soondae, and Spain has morcilla. Kenya has mutura.

Sometimes translated into English as “African blood sausage” in that mannerless way we have of translating non-English things into English, mutura is richer than its European relatives, as it’s packed with a powerful blend of spices. Mutura will have ginger; it will have garlic; it will have scallions, cilantro, and chile so fine and wonderful a person weeps for joy while eating it. Nothing else matters. Expositions about Kenyan food will talk about nyama choma, ugali, chapati, etc. But mutura, that’s where it’s at.

Furthermore, making mutura is a specific skill, a skill that is slowly becoming harder to come by. Mutura has to be made by hand, unlike smokies, which can be industrially produced. Moreover, unlike the Farmer’s Choice smokies, mutura doesn’t have preservatives and so can’t be mass-produced. Even posh and/or colonial establishments that are gentrifying the product face this problem, and so, for them, mutura is mostly only served on special occasions, such as weddings.

Listen, eating mutura is death: When you eat it, you sense all the cholesterol, all the high blood pressure, all the heart disease, reaching out and yanking you into your grave. In fact, a report by researchers at the University of Nairobi was blunt in cautioning about the dangers of mutura, saying, among other things, “Our study shows roasted and non-roasted African sausages sold in meat outlets in Nairobi County are contaminated with staphylococcus, bacillus, streptococcus, proteus, and E. coli organisms.” Partaking in the glories of mutura means potentially acquiring a who’s who of bacterial killers.

This is what used to happen: After a goat was slaughtered, its throat was sliced open and the blood collected in a bucket or container with salt. The salt ensured the blood remained in its jelly-like form, rather than clotting up in globs. The neck and back of the slaughtered animal were cut up into small pieces and cooked together with vegetables, such as eggplants, carrots, onions, coriander, carrots, bell peppers, chiles, and bitter herbs. Next, the excess fat from under the animal’s skin and tail, together with the previously collected salted blood, would be added to this mixture, and then the whole thing would be fried under low heat. Once cooked, this mixture is what would be stuffed into the intestines.

The intestines themselves had to have been cleaned before anything could be put into them. This was done using a process called kúmiria mara, where the unprocessed food in the intestines would be squeezed out downward from the stomach end to the rectum end and then the tubes were washed out.

This process ensured that the intestines were cleaned up without being pierced. Nowadays, what happens is that a hose is attached to one end and then water pumps out whatever’s inside the intestines—the joys of modern technology. After the intestines were stuffed, the mutura was then either roasted directly or, before the roasting, boiled together with the head and lower legs (mathagiro) of the goat. The sausage was then roasted until its exterior achieved a golden brown.

Among the Gikuyu, mutura was not the only type of ndundiro, or sausage.

But the illicitness of mutura is the point, and it adds glory to the entire experience: eating it under cover of darkness; eating it by the side of the road; eating it with your hands, which are, more likely than not, unwashed; and not thinking about where the meat is gotten from, especially since meat in Nairobi is under a lot of scrutiny for having failed numerous health checks; it’s all part of the deal. The first time I discovered mutura as an 11-year-old in Kisumu, I knew instinctively that my parents wouldn’t approve, and so I ate it with delight.