Citrus × aurantiifolia (the key, West Indian, or Mexican lime) · C. × latifolia (the Persian, Tahiti, or Bearss lime, the seedless lime of world commerce) · C. hystrix (the makrut lime, grown for its leaf and rind) · C. australasica (the Australian finger lime) · C. × microcarpa (the calamansi or Philippine lime) · C. limetta (the sweet lime or mosambi)
Origin: Island and mainland Southeast Asia for the true limes: the key lime arose in the Malay Archipelago as a cross between the wild papeda <em>Citrus micrantha</em> and the citron carried down from the eastern Himalaya, and the makrut lime is native to the same archipelago and the Malay Peninsula. Two further limes have origins of their own: the finger lime in the subtropical rainforests of eastern Australia, and the calamansi in the Philippine archipelago
Almost nothing in the genus Citrus is what it appears to be, and the lime is the most tangled case of all. Genomic work has established that the entire cultivated genus descends from a handful of wild ancestors, of which three matter here: the citron (Citrus medica) of the eastern Himalayan foothills, the mandarin (C. reticulata) of southern China, and the papedas, a group of hard, seedy, aromatic wild citrus of island Southeast Asia. Nearly everything else, the lemon, the orange, the grapefruit, the lime, is a hybrid or a hybrid of hybrids, and because citrus is readily propagated by cutting and by grafting, and because many kinds set seed without fertilisation, a single lucky cross could be perpetuated unchanged for thousands of years. The lime is not one fruit but at least five, and they are not close relatives of one another.
The key lime, C. × aurantiifolia, is the original and the archetype: small, thin-skinned, greenish-yellow when truly ripe, seedy, and possessed of a piercing floral acidity that no other citrus quite reproduces. It is the child of the papeda C. micrantha and the citron, which means it could only have arisen where both parents grew, in island Southeast Asia, with the citron having been carried east out of the Himalayan foothills long before. The makrut lime, C. hystrix, is a papeda in its own right and a wholly separate plant, knobbled and almost juiceless, grown not for its juice at all but for its double-lobed leaf and its intensely perfumed rind. The finger lime, C. australasica, belongs to a lineage that separated from the Asian citrus millions of years ago in the rainforests of eastern Australia, and bears a cylindrical fruit filled not with segments but with free, crisp, caviar-like vesicles that burst on the tongue. The calamansi, C. × microcarpa, is a mandarin crossed with a kumquat and is botanically no lime at all, though English has called it the Philippine lime for two centuries and the Philippine kitchen treats it as one.
The fruit that most of the world now buys is younger and stranger than any of them. The Persian or Tahiti lime, C. × latifolia, is a triploid: it carries three sets of chromosomes rather than two, which is why it sets no seed, and it arose as a chance cross between the key lime and a lemon or citron somewhere in the Persian or eastern Mediterranean world. Being seedless it can be perpetuated only by cutting, and being triploid it is larger, thicker-skinned, less aromatic, and very much more robust in transport than its parent. Those qualities decided the modern trade. The delicate key lime bruises, spoils, and refuses to travel; the Persian lime crosses oceans in a refrigerated container and arrives unmarked, and it is accordingly the lime of virtually every supermarket on earth, whilst the older and better-flavoured fruit survives in the places that grow it.
The lime moved west along the Indian Ocean long before it moved anywhere else. Carried out of the Malay Archipelago by the Austronesian and Indian merchants who worked the monsoon routes, it reached the Malabar Coast early and settled so completely into Indian life that it acquired religious as well as culinary functions, and from India it went on with the dhow trade to Oman and the Persian Gulf. There it met the one climate that could dry it, and the Omani invention of the black lime, the whole fruit boiled in brine and left in the desert sun until it turns hollow, brittle, and nearly black, produced a wholly new ingredient: a sour, musty, faintly fermented thing that keeps for years and flavours a stew as no fresh citrus can. From Oman the dried lime passed into Persia and Iraq as the limu omani, and it remains the defining note of Gulf and Persian cooking to this day.
The westward spread beyond that owed everything to the agricultural revolution of the Islamic world, which between the eighth and the twelfth centuries carried sugar cane, rice, cotton, hard wheat, and the whole citrus family from the Indian and Persian world across North Africa to Spain. The Andalusi agronomists knew the fruit and wrote about its cultivation, and it was planted through the irrigated gardens of the peninsula; yet the lime never displaced the lemon in European cooking, and it remains to this day a marginal fruit on the European table. What Iberia gave it was not a cuisine but a ship. On his second voyage in 1493 Columbus carried citrus seed to Hispaniola, the lime took to the Antilles as though it had been waiting for them, and within a century it had naturalised across the whole Caribbean basin and become the acid of an entire hemisphere.
The consequences were enormous and are still visible on every plate. In Peru the lime met a pre-Columbian tradition of curing raw fish in the acid juices of the tumbo and in fermented maize, and produced ceviche. In Mexico it became so completely the national seasoning that the word limón now means, to a Mexican, a lime and not a lemon. In Brazil, reached by Portuguese rather than Spanish ships, it became the limão of the caipirinha. In Cuba it made the mojito and the daiquiri; in Trinidad the chow; in the Florida Keys a pie. Britain's contribution was of another kind: after the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 obliged British vessels to carry an antiscorbutic, the Navy and the merchant fleet turned from Mediterranean lemon juice to lime juice from the West Indian plantations of Montserrat and Dominica, and the sailors of the world's largest fleet were nicknamed limeys for it. The switch was, ironically, a nutritional mistake, since the lime carries markedly less vitamin C than the lemon and the juice was further ruined by being pumped through copper piping; scurvy duly reappeared in the polar expeditions of the following decades.
The last movements were oceanic and recent. Lime trees were planted deliberately on Pacific islands by European ships as a defence against scurvy, and in Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, and the Marianas the fruit was taken straight into the existing habit of eating fish raw with coconut, producing poisson cru, kokoda, and kelaguen. The seedless Persian lime, having arrived in Brazil with the Portuguese, travelled onward to Australia and thence, by way of Tahiti, to California, where it was propagated from 1875 and where the Bearss selection of 1895 gave the world its commercial lime. And in the last thirty years two limes have gone global that had never left home before: the makrut leaf, now sold frozen and dried in every city with a Thai restaurant, and the Australian finger lime, gathered by Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years and lifted into international restaurant cooking only in the nineteen-nineties.
Mexico is the world's greatest lime country by a wide margin, growing both the small Mexican lime of the Pacific states and the seedless Persian lime of Veracruz, and exporting the second in enormous quantity to the United States; India, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, and Peru follow. The trade is overwhelmingly in C. × latifolia, whose thick skin and absent seeds suit it to mechanical handling and long shipping, whilst the key lime, better in flavour and impossible to keep, is grown for local markets in the Caribbean, Mexico, India, and Southeast Asia and is what most of the world's lime dishes were actually designed around. The distinction matters in the kitchen: a key lime is more floral, more bitter, and sharper, and a recipe built on it will taste thin if made with the supermarket fruit.
Beside the juice limes stand four quite separate trades. The makrut lime is grown across Southeast Asia for its leaf, which is now a world commodity sold fresh, frozen, and dried wherever Thai food is cooked, and for its rind, which is pounded into curry pastes; the fruit's juice is barely used. The dried black lime of Oman and Iran, whole or ground, is a staple of Gulf, Iraqi, and Persian cooking and is sold in every Middle Eastern grocer. The calamansi is the everyday citrus of the Philippines, squeezed over almost everything and bottled as the national soft drink. And the finger lime, once a bush food known only to the Aboriginal peoples of the eastern Australian rainforests, is now a small luxury crop grown in Australia, California, Spain, and Italy, its glassy vesicles scattered over oysters and desserts under the trade name of citrus caviar.
What unites this scattered family is a function rather than a flavour: across the whole tropical and subtropical world the lime is the acid of choice, doing the work that vinegar does in Europe and that the lemon does around the Mediterranean. It cures raw fish from Lima to Tahiti; it dresses green papaya in Isaan and green mango in Port of Spain; it sharpens the fish sauce of Vietnam and the beer of Mexico; it cuts the fat of a Persian stew; and it turns rum, cachaça, tequila, and gin into the four or five most widely drunk mixed drinks on earth. Few ingredients are so nearly universal and so seldom the named subject of a dish, and fewer still can claim to have given the English language a nickname for an entire nation's sailors.
The limes on a market stall are two different fruits. The Key or Mexican lime, Citrus × aurantiifolia, is small, thin-skinned, seedy, sharply aromatic, and the one behind Key lime pie and most Latin American cooking. The Persian or Tahiti lime, Citrus × latifolia, is larger, seedless, less aromatic, and far easier to ship, which is why it is what most shops sell.
The makrut lime, Citrus hystrix, is grown for its double-lobed leaf and knobbled rind rather than its juice, and it is indispensable across Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and Indonesian cooking. It is still often labelled with an older name that is a racial slur in southern Africa, and makrut is the term to use.
Limu omani, the black dried lime of the Gulf and Iraq, is a preparation rather than a variety: limes boiled in brine and dried in the sun until hollow and near-black, then pierced and dropped whole into stews for a sour, fermented, faintly bitter depth. The Australian finger lime and the Philippine calamansi are separate species again.
Historical Journey of Lime
The Rainforests of Southeast Queensland & Northern New South Wales — c. 8000 BCE
Australia's citrus separated from the Asian stock millions of years ago and produced fruits found nowhere else, of which the strangest and the finest is the finger lime, Citrus australasica. It grows as an understorey shrub in the subtropical rainforest and dry vine scrub of the border country between southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales, and its fruit is a slender cylinder, green, black, crimson, or pink according to the tree, that contains no ordinary segments at all: the juice vesicles are free, firm, and glassy, and they spill out of a cut fruit like roe and burst separately on the tongue with a clean, resinous acidity. The Bundjalung, Yugambeh, and neighbouring peoples of the region gathered and ate it for thousands of years, and used the leaves and fruit medicinally, and the plant has been a known bush food for as long as there has been anyone to know it. It went unnoticed by the settler kitchen for the better part of two centuries and was lifted into general cooking only in the nineteen-nineties, when Australian chefs took it up and the trade invented the name citrus caviar for it. Its natural partner was found immediately and has not been improved upon: the vesicles scattered raw over a freshly shucked Sydney rock oyster, which needs no other dressing at all.
The Malay Archipelago & the Sunda Shelf — c. 3000 BCE
The islands between the Malay Peninsula and New Guinea are the cradle of the true limes, and of two of them at once. Growing wild here is the papeda Citrus micrantha, a hard, seedy, aromatic citrus of no direct culinary use whatever, which crossed at some point with the citron (C. medica) carried east out of the eastern Himalayan foothills to produce C. × aurantiifolia, the small, thin-skinned, piercingly acid key lime that is the ancestor of every juice lime on earth. Growing beside it, and quite separate, is C. hystrix, the makrut lime, itself a papeda, knobbled and warty and almost without juice, which the archipelago values not for its flesh but for its rind and above all for its curious double-lobed leaf, one leaf apparently grown upon another, whose perfume is amongst the most distinctive in all of cookery. Both are cultivated across Indonesia and Malaysia as the limau nipis, the thin lime, and the jeruk purut, the knobbled citrus, and both are used raw and late, squeezed or torn over a finished dish rather than cooked into it. The clearest expression is the Balinese sambal matah, the raw sambal in which nothing is cooked at all: shallot, chilli, lemongrass, and torn makrut leaf are sliced fine, dressed with lime juice and hot coconut oil, and eaten as a fierce, fragrant relish beside grilled fish.
The Philippine Archipelago — c. 1000 BCE
The Philippines has a citrus of its own, and calls it a lime although it is nothing of the sort. The calamansi, Citrus × microcarpa, is a cross between a mandarin and a kumquat that arose in the archipelago and the neighbouring islands, and it bears a fruit no bigger than a large marble, green outside and orange within, with a juice that is sour like a lime but carries the sweet, resinous perfume of the mandarin behind the acid. English named it the Philippine lime two centuries ago and the name has stuck, because that is exactly the office it fills. Calamansi is the acid of the Philippine table in the way that the lime is of the Mexican: halved and squeezed over grilled fish, over noodles, over fried rice, and over almost every soup; mixed with soy sauce to make the universal dipping sauce toyomansi; stirred with sugar and cold water into the juice that is the country's own soft drink; and worked, with vinegar, lemongrass, garlic, and annatto oil, into the marinade for chicken inasal, the charcoal-grilled chicken of Bacolod on Negros that is the finest thing the Philippine grill does. The fruit is squeezed at the moment of eating, never before, and a Filipino table without a saucer of halved calamansi upon it is an incomplete table.
The Malabar Coast & Southern India — c. 800 CE
The lime crossed the Bay of Bengal early, carried west out of the Malay Archipelago by the merchants who worked the monsoon routes, and it settled into Indian life so completely that Sanskrit gave it a name, nimbū, which is the ancestor of the English word and remains the ordinary Hindi and Malayalam term for the fruit today. India took to it as a preserving acid before anything else. The Kerala naranga achar, in which whole limes are quartered, salted, and left in the sun until the rind softens and darkens, then dressed with chilli, fenugreek, asafoetida, and gingelly oil, is one of the oldest surviving forms of Indian pickling and one of the very few in which the fruit's own juice, drawn out by salt, is the entire pickling liquor. The Malabar Coast, which was the pepper port of the ancient world and later the meeting place of Arab, Jewish, Syrian Christian, and Portuguese traders, also produced the lime's most refreshing use, sulaimani chai, the black tea served without milk and sharpened with lime juice and a little spice that is drunk after every heavy Mappila meal. Beside these run the lime waters of the hot months, the lime in the tempering of a rasam, and the lime that hangs with green chillies at every Indian doorway to turn away the evil eye.
Oman & the Arabian Gulf — c. 1000 CE
The dhows that ran between the Malabar Coast and the Arabian ports brought the lime to Oman, and Oman did something with it that no other country had thought to do. The whole fruit is boiled briefly in salted water and then left in the sun until it is entirely dry: the flesh collapses, the fruit becomes hollow and light and rattles when shaken, and the skin darkens through tan to a deep, matte, almost black brown. This is the loomi, the black lime, and it is not merely a dried lime any more than a raisin is a wet grape. The drying works a slow fermentation upon the fruit, and what emerges is sour, musty, faintly bitter, and profoundly savoury, with a smell somewhere between citrus and old wine, and it will keep for years in a jar. Two or three of them, pierced with a skewer so that the cooking liquid can enter, are dropped whole into the pot at the beginning of a long braise, and by the end they have given up an acidity that no fresh citrus could survive to deliver and a depth that no fresh citrus possesses at all. Every great rice dish of the peninsula is built upon them: the Emirati and Bahraini machboos, in which the limes perfume the whole pot of spiced rice and meat, and the Saudi kabsa of the Najd, the dish of every feast and every act of hospitality from Riyadh to the Gulf coast.
Isfahan, Persia & Mesopotamia — c. 1100 CE
Persia received two limes and gave the world one of them. The first came up the Gulf from Oman: the black lime, which Persian calls limu omani, the lime of Oman, or limu amani, and which found in the Persian khoresh the slow, sour, herb-laden braise it was made for. Ghormeh sabzi, the national dish of Iran, is a great pot of fried herbs, kidney beans, and lamb whose entire character rests on the four or five dried limes dropped in whole and left to soften and leak for two hours; khoresh gheymeh, the yellow split pea stew crowned with matchstick potatoes, does the same. Persians take the used limes out and squeeze them against the side of the pot, and argue about whether to slit them, prick them, or crush them. The second lime is a stranger accident. At some point in these centuries, somewhere in the Persian or eastern Mediterranean world, a key lime crossed with a lemon or a citron and threw a triploid seedling: a plant with three sets of chromosomes, and therefore sterile, seedless, and propagable only by cutting. Its fruit is larger, thicker-skinned, greener, and less aromatic than its parent, and it keeps and travels as the key lime never could. This is Citrus × latifolia, and by an extraordinarily roundabout journey through Brazil, Australia, Tahiti, and California it became the Persian lime of every supermarket on earth, though it is scarcely eaten in Persia at all.
Seville & Al-Andalus — c. 1150 CE
Between the eighth and the twelfth centuries the Islamic world moved a whole agriculture westward, carrying sugar cane, rice, cotton, hard wheat, the aubergine, and the entire citrus family out of India and Persia across North Africa and into the irrigated gardens of the Iberian Peninsula, and the lime travelled with them. The Sevillan agronomist Ibn al-'Awwam, writing in the later twelfth century, describes the cultivation of the citrus family in detail, and the fruit was grown through the huertas of Al-Andalus alongside the bitter orange, the citron, and the lemon. Yet it never took hold. Iberia and the Mediterranean beyond it are at the cold limit of what the lime will tolerate, and where the lemon flourished and became the acid of every European kitchen the lime remained a curiosity, sensitive to frost, poor in yield, and always second choice; to this day it is a marginal fruit on the European table, and a European recipe calling for citrus juice means a lemon unless it says otherwise. What Iberia gave the lime instead was a ship. The fruit was aboard when Columbus sailed from Cadiz on his second voyage in 1493, carrying seed and seedlings of the whole Mediterranean garden to the islands he had found the year before, and it was in the Americas rather than in Europe that the lime became indispensable.
Sukhothai, Siam & the Kingdoms of Mainland Southeast Asia — c. 1250 CE
No cuisine on earth has organised itself around the lime as thoroughly as that of Thailand and its neighbours. Thai cooking is built upon a deliberate and constantly adjusted balance of four tastes, sour, salt, sweet, and hot, and the sour is very largely the juice of the manao, squeezed in at the last possible moment because heat destroys its aroma; the cook tastes, adds fish sauce, tastes, adds lime, and tastes again, and the dish is not finished until the balance is right. Beside the juice lime works the makrut, whose torn leaves and pounded rind carry a wholly different perfume, floral and almost soapy in isolation and indispensable in the pot. Between them they define the region's most famous dishes. Tom yum goong is the clearest case of all, a clear, ferociously sour and hot prawn soup in which lemongrass, galangal, and makrut leaf are steeped and the lime juice is added off the heat at the moment of serving. Tom kha gai softens the same aromatics with coconut milk; som tam, the pounded green papaya salad of Isaan, dresses the shredded fruit with lime, fish sauce, palm sugar, and chilli in the mortar; laab, the minced meat salad of Laos and the Thai northeast, is essentially lime juice, fish sauce, chilli, herbs, and toasted rice powder; and the makrut leaf torn over a green curry is what tells a Thai kitchen from any other in Asia.
Hispaniola, Havana & the Greater Antilles — c. 1493 CE
Columbus carried citrus seed to Hispaniola on his second voyage in 1493, and no plant the Spanish brought across took to the Caribbean more completely. The lime found in the Antilles a climate that suited it far better than Iberia ever had, escaped cultivation within a generation, and naturalised through the scrub and along the roadsides of every island from Cuba to Trinidad, so that within a century it was growing wild and free and had become the ordinary acid of the whole region. What made it famous, however, was its meeting with a second Caribbean product. Sugar cane brought distillation, distillation brought rum, and the raw, harsh spirit of the early plantations needed sweetening and souring to be drinkable at all; the resulting formula of spirit, sugar, citrus, water, and spice is the ancestor of every mixed drink now made. From it Cuba drew its two great contributions to the world's bars: the mojito, in which lime and yerba buena are bruised together in the bottom of a tall glass beneath white rum, sugar, and soda, and the daiquiri, named for the iron-mining beach east of Santiago and reduced by Havana bartenders to a shaken essential of rum, lime juice, and sugar and nothing else at all. Both are, in the end, arguments about how much lime a glass of rum can carry.
Lima & the Peruvian Coast — c. 1550 CE
The lime arrived on the Peruvian coast with the Spanish and walked straight into a tradition that had been waiting two thousand years for it. The Moche and their neighbours had long cured raw fish in acid, using the juice of the tumbo and other native passion fruits and the sour liquor of fermented maize, and the arrival of a cheap, abundant, and far sharper citrus transformed the practice rather than inventing it. What resulted is ceviche, which Peru regards as a national possession and defends with some heat: firm white fish cut into cubes, tossed with lime juice, salt, sliced red onion, and ají limo, and served within minutes rather than hours, so that the fish is barely opaque at the edges and still translucent within. The acid liquor left in the bowl, the leche de tigre, is drunk on its own as a restorative. The lime in question is the limón sutil or limón peruano, a small, thin-skinned, bitter, intensely perfumed key lime grown chiefly in the northern valleys around Piura, and Peruvian cooks are adamant that no other citrus will do and that it must be squeezed gently, never wrung, lest the bitter oil of the rind spoil the dish. From the same lime come the layered potato terrine causa limeña and the drink that Lima made its own, the pisco sour, in which the grape brandy of the coastal valleys is shaken with lime juice, sugar, and egg white.
Bahia & the Brazilian Coast — c. 1560 CE
Brazil received its lime not from Spain but from Portugal, whose own citrus came, like Spain's, from the Arab plantings of the Iberian Peninsula, and whose ships carried the fruit to the Atlantic islands and thence to the coast of Bahia within a few decades of the landfall of 1500. The plant flourished, and Brazilian Portuguese settled the question of names in the lime's favour: limão, which in Portugal is a lemon, means in Brazil the small green lime, and the lemon, when it is met with at all, must be distinguished as the limão siciliano. The fruit is everywhere in the Brazilian kitchen, squeezed over grilled fish and over the feijoada, worked into the marinades of the northeast, and stirred into the fresh fruit juices and granitas that the heat of the coast demands. But its monument is a drink of three ingredients invented for the sick and adopted by the well. The caipirinha began, by the usual account, as a country remedy for influenza in the sugar-growing interior of São Paulo state, lime and garlic and honey in cachaça; the garlic and the honey were dropped, the sugar and the ice were added, and what remained was the national drink of Brazil, in which whole limes are cut into wedges and crushed skin and all with sugar so that the oil of the rind goes into the glass along with the juice.
Mérida & the Yucatán Peninsula — c. 1600 CE
The Yucatán stands somewhat apart from the rest of Mexico, cut off by forest and sea and looking towards the Caribbean and the Gulf rather than towards the central highlands, and it has a lime of its own to match. The lima agria, the sour lime of the peninsula, is a squat, thick-rinded, pale fruit whose juice is mild but whose peel carries a distinctive bitter perfume, and it is the fruit that gives the region's most famous soup its name and its point. Sopa de lima is a clear, sharp broth of turkey or chicken scented with Yucatecan oregano, hung with strips of the fried tortilla, and finished with the juice and a slice of the bitter lime, and a version made with an ordinary lime is a different and lesser thing. The peninsula's other great lime preparation is the scarlet escabeche de cebolla morada, red onion sliced fine and steeped in sour lime juice with oregano and habanero until it turns brilliant pink and loses its harshness, which is set upon the table beside every plate of cochinita pibil, every panucho, and every bowl of beans. Between the soup and the onions the Yucatán makes the case, more clearly than anywhere else in Mexico, that the lime is not a garnish squeezed over a finished dish but a structural ingredient in its own right.
London & the British West Indies — c. 1795 CE
Scurvy killed more British sailors than every enemy of the age of sail combined, and the lime's entry into British life was a matter of state rather than of appetite. James Lind's shipboard trial of 1747 had shown citrus to cure the disease, and from 1795 the Royal Navy issued lemon juice with results that were immediate and dramatic; but after the Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 made an antiscorbutic ration compulsory throughout the merchant fleet, the supply was switched from Mediterranean lemons to lime juice pressed on the British West Indian plantations of Montserrat and Dominica, on the frankly commercial ground that it came from British soil and British ships. It was a mistake. The lime carries roughly half the ascorbic acid of the lemon, and what survived being pumped through copper piping and stored for months was less again, so that scurvy returned quietly to British vessels and disastrously to the polar expeditions of the following decades. The nickname stuck all the same, and American and Australian sailors who called their British counterparts lime-juicers and then limeys have given the language a word that outlived the ration by a century and a half. Two things of lasting worth came out of it: the lime cordial that Lauchlin Rose of Leith patented in 1867, the first fruit concentrate anywhere preserved without alcohol, and the drink the wardroom made from it, gin and Rose's lime and nothing more, which is the gimlet.
Tahiti, Fiji & the Pacific Islands — c. 1800 CE
The lime reached the Pacific islands aboard European ships, and largely on purpose. Vessels working the long Pacific passages planted citrus deliberately at their watering places as a defence against scurvy, and the lime, which fruits young and needs no care, established itself across Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia within a few decades of first contact. What it met there was a tradition already perfectly shaped to receive it. Islanders across the whole ocean had long eaten fish raw, dressed with seawater and with the pressed cream of the grated coconut, and the arrival of a sharp and abundant acid completed the dish rather than changing it. The results are the same idea worked out independently on a hundred archipelagos: the Tahitian poisson cru, tuna cubed and marinated briefly in lime before the coconut cream goes in; the Fijian kokoda, in which the fish is left longer in the juice and the cream is cut with chilli, onion, and tomato; the Samoan oka; and, in the Mariana Islands, the Chamorro kelaguen, in which the meat of the coconut crab or of chicken is chopped fine and dressed with lime juice, grated coconut, spring onion, and the fiery local donne' sali chilli. In every case the lime does the cooking, and in every case it is added last and eaten soon.
Port of Spain, Trinidad & the Lesser Antilles — c. 1850 CE
In the Lesser Antilles the lime grows so freely along every roadside and in every yard that it has become less an ingredient than a habit, and Trinidad has built two institutions upon it. The first is chow: unripe fruit, chiefly green mango and pineapple but also plum, pommecythere, and cucumber, cut into pieces and tossed with lime juice, salt, crushed garlic, hot pepper, and the long serrated leaf of the chadon beni, then left in a bowl or a sealed jar for an hour to draw and soften. It is street food, school-gate food, and beach food, sold from buckets and made at home by everybody, and it depends entirely upon the lime, which both seasons the fruit and pickles it. The second is the punch. The English-speaking Caribbean codified the rum punch into a rhyme that fixed its proportions for good, one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, and four of weak, and the sour is always the lime; in Grenada the same formula is finished with grated nutmeg from the island's own trees. Around these stands the verb the region has made of the fruit's name, for in Trinidad to lime is to pass time agreeably with friends and no particular purpose, and a lime is the gathering itself.
Key West & the Florida Keys — c. 1856 CE
The small West Indian lime came to the Florida Keys from the Caribbean, planted by Spanish settlers and spread through the islands by the Bahamian wreckers, spongers, and turtlers who settled Key West in the early nineteenth century and were known as Conchs. It grew wild on the coral rock where little else would, and the fruit it bore, small, yellow when ripe, thin-skinned, seedy, and far more aromatic than the green supermarket lime, took the name of the islands: the Key lime. What made it famous was an accident of supply. Key West at the end of the nineteenth century had no fresh milk, no ice, and no reliable oven, but it had the sweetened condensed milk that Gail Borden had patented in 1856 and that the schooners brought in by the case; and when the acid of the Key lime is stirred into condensed milk with egg yolk, the juice thickens and sets the mixture without any heat at all. That single chemical fact is the whole of the Key lime pie: a filling that needs no cooking, in a crumb crust of the crackers that also came in by boat, tasting of nothing but lime, cream, and sugar. The pie is the official dessert of the state of Florida, and its colour is the subject of a settled local dogma, for the juice of a true Key lime is pale yellow and a green Key lime pie is a fraud.
Hanoi & the Red River Delta — c. 1900 CE
The lime is as old in Vietnam as it is anywhere in mainland Southeast Asia, but the Vietnamese use of it is unlike any other, because Vietnamese cooking hands the final seasoning to the person eating. Almost nothing arrives fully dressed. A bowl of phở comes with a plate of herbs, bean sprouts, chilli, and a wedge of chanh; a plate of grilled meat comes with a saucer of salt and pepper into which a lime is squeezed at the table; and the diner adjusts, tastes, and adjusts again, so that the sourness of a Vietnamese meal is individual rather than fixed. At the centre of the practice stands nước chấm, the dipping sauce that appears at very nearly every Vietnamese meal and is the single most characteristic thing in the cuisine: fish sauce, sugar, water, lime juice, garlic, and chilli, balanced by taste rather than by measurement, into which spring rolls, grilled pork, rice paper rolls, and rice noodles are dipped, and which is poured over the vermicelli of a bún. The lime is what makes it possible, for the acid tempers the salt of the fish sauce and the sugar together and lifts what would otherwise be merely briny into something bright. Vietnamese cooks add it last and never heat it, and a nước chấm mixed an hour before the meal is already past its best.
Colima, Michoacán & the Mexican Pacific — c. 1930 CE
Mexico grows more limes than any other country on earth, and the industry that made it so is concentrated on the Pacific slope, in Colima, Michoacán, and Guerrero, where the small Mexican lime, the same thin-skinned West Indian fruit that the Spanish first landed in the Antilles, is cropped almost the year round; the seedless Persian lime, grown chiefly in Veracruz, supplies the export trade to the United States. Both are called limón, for Mexican Spanish has given the word to the lime outright, and a Mexican who wants a lemon must ask for a limón amarillo and will probably not get one. The consequence is a national seasoning applied with a freedom that startles visitors. Lime goes over sliced fruit with chilli and salt, over roasted maize on the cob, over crisps, over soup, into every salsa, over tacos of every kind, and into the guacamole that would brown and flatten without it. It is drunk as often as it is eaten: in the agua de limón of every market stall, in the salt-rimmed margarita, and above all in the michelada, in which a cold light beer is poured over lime juice, salt, and hot sauce in a salt-rimmed glass, a preparation that manages to be simultaneously a hangover cure, a summer drink, and a national argument about what may legitimately be added to it.
