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.”
