The Gourmand — The Gourmand’s Lemon
Few fruits carry so much history. The lemon was the star of the Renaissance gardens that shaped the Medici dynasty. It wards off scurvy, played a role in the birth of the Mafia, and since the year 600 its juice has served as invisible ink for writing secret messages.
In this second volume of their collaboration with TASCHEN, The Gourmand — the London magazine that has been crossing food with culture since 2011 — follows the trail of that yellow fruit through art, cinema, literature, and cooking. It reconstructs the lemon’s bewilderingly tangled genealogy and discovers it as a literary device in Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Wolfe, and James Joyce; entangled in the love affairs of the Bloomsbury Group; and transformed, at lemonade stands, into an image of the American Dream.
The Old Masters painted it in their still lifes, and the lemon inspired the advances of Picasso, Matisse, and Warhol. It has reached the vanguard of design with Philippe Starck’s iconic Juicy Salif and the simple but revolutionary Jif Lemon, and into the decorative arts — from Arts and Crafts wallpapers to mythological-themed ceramics.
The journey is completed by more than sixty recipes from around the world with a touch of lemon — from poultry to sauces, and from classic cocktails to desserts — photographed exclusively by Bobby Doherty. The prologue is signed by chef and gastronome Simon Hopkinson and the introduction by writer and art critic Jennifer Higgie, for whom lemons are “symbols, secret codes, ingredients; vehicles of meaning and metaphor; small cathedrals, fruit for dreaming.”
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