Ah, yes—another experiment! Brilliant! Feel free to sit this one out, which might be our way of phrasing the obligatory “don’t try this at home, kids,” or something lile that. In any event, welcome to our lab, which looks suspiciously identical to our kitchen, but we have to keep our enemies guessing, now don’t we (Slugworth, Moriarty, Escher (we take issue with his perspective…sorry))?
The conception of this experiment arose, rather serendipitously, from the embers of another citrous experiment (this will be hilarious shortly). After smoking a whole lemon over a wood fire in order to procure smoked lemon zest, we decided to place the whole lemon in the fire (see! It’s funny because it was in the actual embers—clever blokes, we are!). We removed the lemon from the fire once the rind had become blackened and embrous, and then proceeded to strip away the more offending burnt portions. The culminating mass had been cooked to a delicate tenderness: mellowed, but undeniably citrus—the bark without the bite—with gossamer notes of char, as though a single layer of charcoal scraped across parchment, had been lifted from the paper, and allowed to settle, at leisure, on the tongue. We experimented with different amounts of charred rind and flesh until we found one that matched our standard for excellence. To achieve this, it is necessary to remove all but those blackened flakes whose size is comparable to the most innocent of freshly-sharpened, pencil-tip breaks. Still, the texture of larger flakes matches wonderfully the heartiness of whole-wheat toast, or the supple flesh of a medium-rare fish.
The jelly may either be sweetened with sugar, or left as is. Should you wish to escape verbosity, below are the less-poetic instructions:
-Take a whole lemon and place it in a fire fireplace, or in a closed grill, set to its highest setting
-Once blackened and glowing red, remove the lemon with tongs
-Remove the rind with a knife. If adequately cooked, it should come off with no trouble
-Pick off the majority of the blackened flakes of lemon that are still attached to the fruit flesh, and remove the seeds
-Add sugar if using as a sweet jam
(alas, we don’t have a shot of the finished jam—the burnt pieces here are far too big for any preparation)
Erubite 