La Limone Kitchen Cookbook: A Celebration of Cooking with Lemons

There are certain ingredients I simply can’t imagine my kitchen in Italy without, and lemons are high on that list. I have a lemon tree at home outside Rome that has been with our family for almost 39 years, and I leave the lemons right where they belong - on the tree - until I’m ready to use them. I’ll pick one for salad dressing, zest another over pasta, or squeeze fresh juice over fish, vegetables, meat and just about anything else that could use that unmistakable bright flavor. Cooking with lemons is such a natural part of my everyday life in Italy that I hardly stop to think about how often I use them.

So when I sat down in Rome with Joanna Palmer, author of La Limone Kitchen Cookbook, we had quite a lot to talk about. As the name suggests, Joanna’s cookbook revolves around lemons, but our conversation quickly became about much more than recipes. We talked about family food traditions, learning to cook without rigid rules, choosing and storing lemons, the best way to zest them, and the small kitchen habits we inherit from the people around us. And, inevitably, we talked about cooking with lemons, because once you start paying attention to how often you reach for a lemon in the kitchen, you realize just how versatile this one ingredient can be.

Cooking With Lemons - and Family Recipes

One of the things I particularly enjoyed about La Limone Kitchen Cookbook is that Joanna doesn’t treat recipes as isolated instructions. They come with stories, and many of those stories begin with her family. Take lemon pie. When Joanna was deciding which family lemon pie recipe should go into the cookbook, she ran into a problem. Her mother was an excellent pie maker, but so were Aunt Bev and Aunt Barb. Choosing one recipe would have meant leaving the others out, so Joanna came up with a wonderfully diplomatic solution: she included all of them.

I loved that decision because it says something important about the way recipes actually work in families. There often isn’t one definitive version of a beloved dish. Three women can make three slightly different lemon pies, and each one can be part of the family’s culinary history. It also shows that cooking with lemons can mean something very different from one family and one cook to another. Joanna leaves the final decision exactly where it belongs - with the cook. Make the pies and decide for yourself which one wins.

Cooking With Lemons Without Rigid Rules

Another section of Joanna’s cookbook immediately caught my attention: “Important Notes From My Kitchen.” Rather than pretending every cook works at precisely the same speed, Joanna acknowledges something we all know from experience. A recipe that takes one person 15 minutes might take someone else 25, and that doesn’t mean the second cook has done anything wrong.

She uses descriptions such as “super quick” and “super involved” to give cooks a sense of what they’re getting into without turning cooking into a race against the clock. She takes a similarly relaxed approach to serving sizes. Instead of insisting that every recipe serves exactly two, four or six people, she uses terms such as “a few,” “a gathering” and “a crowd.”

I like this philosophy because it’s much closer to the way many of us actually cook. Sometimes a dish intended for two disappears between two hungry people. At other times, several dishes are on the table and the same quantity stretches to four. Whether you’re cooking with lemons or making any other kind of meal, cooking is fluid, particularly when you’re cooking for other people, and Joanna gives her readers permission to approach her recipes that way.

Cooking With Lemons Starts With Choosing a Good One

Joanna grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where lemon trees certainly weren’t part of the landscape. She told me that it was Italians who eventually taught her how to choose good fruit. If you’re cooking with lemons, knowing how to pick a good one makes a difference, and Joanna’s lemon checklist is wonderfully straightforward. Pick up the lemon and see how it feels. It should feel heavy for its size, which is a good indication that there’s plenty of juice inside. Look for healthy, smooth skin and good color. If the lemon feels very hard and dried out, chances are the inside won’t be particularly juicy either.

If you’re lucky enough to have your own lemon tree, however, my advice is even simpler: don’t pick the lemon until you need it. That’s exactly what I do because the longer a lemon sits after picking, the more that wonderful freshness of the skin begins to diminish. When I’m cooking with lemons, I can walk outside, pick exactly what I need, give the fruit a rinse and use it immediately. It’s hard to get fresher than that.

My lemon tree has also become part of our family history. I gave it to my husband when our daughter was born, when it was still a small tree growing in a pot. Our daughter is now 39, and the tree has followed us through moves and grown along with our family. Joanna’s own lemon tree is much younger. She recently moved to Arizona and planted citrus trees there, so hers are still getting established. Different climates and different trees, but the same pleasure of eventually being able to walk outside and pick a lemon when you need one.

Cooking With Lemons Means Using the Zest Too

When we think about cooking with lemons, we often think first about lemon juice, but I find the zest every bit as valuable. Joanna and I both rely on one very simple tool: a Microplane. It removes that fragrant outer layer of the lemon without taking too much of the bitter white pith underneath, and once you have fresh lemon zest, you can transform an astonishing number of dishes with very little effort.

One of my favorite quick pastas is a perfect example of cooking with lemons without making things complicated. Start with a little butter and perhaps some onion or garlic, then add cream or milk and plenty of fresh lemon zest. Toss in the pasta with a little pasta cooking water and finish it with Parmesan. It’s creamy and fresh at the same time, and the lemon zest does most of the work. This is exactly the sort of cooking I love - uncomplicated ingredients that produce much more flavor than you might expect.

Cooking With Lemons When You Have Too Many

Of course, not everyone can keep lemons on a tree until they’re needed. Joanna has a different problem in Arizona. During the extreme summer heat, the growing cycle changes, so there are times when lemons need to be harvested even if she can’t use all of them immediately. Her solution is freezing them, something that’s particularly useful if you suddenly find yourself with far more ripe lemons than you can possibly use.

A whole lemon can be frozen and later zested while it’s still frozen. As it thaws, the texture becomes softer, but the fruit can still be cut and the juice used. We also talked about recipes that use the entire lemon rather than separating the zest and juice. Joanna mentioned recipes where whole lemons are blended or cooked, taking advantage of the peel, pulp and juice together. If you’re interested in cooking with lemons, it’s worth remembering just how much of the fruit can be used rather than automatically discarding everything except the juice.

Cooking With Lemons the Italian Way: Simple Salad Dressing

One of the places where you really notice the role of lemons in everyday Italian cooking is salad. We don’t have a collection of bottled salad dressings sitting in the refrigerator. Most of the time, I simply squeeze fresh lemon juice over the salad, add good olive oil and salt, toss everything together and serve it. If there isn’t a lemon available, I might use wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar instead, but fresh lemon juice is one of my standards.

That simplicity is one of the things I love about Italian cooking. When the ingredients are good, you don’t need to cover them up. Good lettuce, extra virgin olive oil, a freshly picked lemon and salt are quite enough. It’s also a perfect example of why cooking with lemons doesn’t have to mean following an elaborate lemon recipe. Sometimes lemon is simply the ingredient that brings everything else together.

Why Cooking With Lemons Makes So Many Foods Taste Better

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Joanna the question I always like asking cookbook authors: What’s your favorite recipe in the book? There was no quick answer. Her memories went instead to dishes made by her mother and mother-in-law. Her mother prepared pickerel, a freshwater fish from Manitoba, with lemon. Her mother-in-law made wonderful cutlets and always squeezed plenty of lemon over them.

That immediately brought us back to Italy, where you’ll often find lemon served alongside fish, fried foods and cutlets. You may squeeze it over vegetables, and you may even find someone squeezing it over a steak. This is perhaps the simplest form of cooking with lemons, but a little fresh lemon juice can change a dish completely. The acidity cuts through richness, wakes up fried foods, balances olive oil and adds freshness without overwhelming the main ingredient. It’s such a small gesture that it’s easy to overlook, but you certainly notice the difference when you taste it.

Cooking With Lemons and Making the Recipes Your Own

What stayed with me after talking to Joanna wasn’t simply the number of ways she uses lemons. It was her relaxed approach to cooking. Her recipes leave room for the person standing in the kitchen. You don’t have to finish in exactly 15 minutes, a serving doesn’t always have to be mathematically precise, and you can decide which family lemon pie you prefer. La Limone Kitchen Cookbook gives you ideas for cooking with lemons, but Joanna also gives you permission to make those recipes your own.

Food shouldn’t feel like a test. Cooking develops through experience: you learn what a good lemon feels like in your hand, discover how much zest you like in your pasta, and start squeezing a little more lemon over a cutlet because you know it tastes better that way. Eventually, those little habits become your own kitchen traditions.

For me, cooking with lemons might mean walking outside to the lemon tree that has been growing alongside our family for nearly four decades, picking one lemon and carrying it straight into the kitchen. For Joanna, it might mean remembering the lemon pies made by the women in her family or waiting for those young Arizona citrus trees to begin producing. Different kitchens, different families and different parts of the world, all connected by one wonderfully useful fruit.

Listen to my full conversation with Joanna Palmer on the Flavor of Italy podcast, where we talk about La Limone Kitchen Cookbook, her family recipes, her approach to cooking and, of course, plenty more about cooking with lemons.

Lemons, lemons, lemons!

A Boatful of Lemons - Positano

Preserved Lemons