Sometimes it takes a long time to tell a story and it can take just as long to boil an orange. It’s simpler than you think. You take an orange, wash it to whatever extent your conscious demands and put it in a pot, with some other oranges for company. Cover with unsalted, completely untouched and boring water and then bring to the boil. Oh, and remember to remove the grocery store stickers.
Boil them for hours.
Boil them til your kitchen smells warm and sweet, vibrant like a Florida orchard where the sun has been beating down all down.
Boil them til your hair begins to smell sweet.
Boil them til the scent overflows through kitchen windows to the garden and the hummingbird or the tui (these are the sweet birds that love to seek wild sugars) come calling and playing.
Boil them til your whole home begins to transport you to perfumery in Paris or London, where precious extracted oils are gently held by robust distilled spirits - holding with enormous strength that which so easily slips away.
Here’s the thing about oranges: if you boil them long enough, you will need no sugar. You will need no additional sweetness, nor sourness, nor salt to hold their entirety. They become wholly complete. You can turn even the most bitter parts of the fruit into the essence of what we love about them.
All that is bitter can be made good, even when your blood boils.
The Christmas season is a terrible time to sow bitter words but a wonderful time to remember how boiling can transform us.
I was never a big fan of oranges as a child - they were too messy, too tart or sometimes too sweet. Their acidity made my teeth buzz and my tongue tingle. Mostly, they melted away into tiny pieces of flesh stuck between my teeth and unfortunate bitter pith beneath my fingernails or brushing the back of my throat.
It’s the clumsiness of all those parts that can’t be easily separated from each other that frustrates me so. Once I learned to segment an orange crudely with a knife, there could be no passion in devouring it because you had to take your time running your teeth along the rind to empty it of pleasure. Even then, the risk of a millimetre of pith could spoil the whole lot. Whether biting or digging through the pith to get to sweetness or finding it at the end - you can hardly ever eat an orange without some bitter-sweet compromise.
Until you learn to segment within the orange itself, delicately freeing juicy pockets of tenderness from membrane. Then you are left with the next great challenge - the enormous waste of the fruit to only delight in the fragrant centre.
Why can we not be more like the birds, using beak and fortitude to break through bitterness to enjoy the sweetness of things?
No, we have little taste for bitterness these days, unless it is to balance what has already been made sweet or sour.
The Long Boil
After a long period of boiling and nearly boiling over, there’s a lot to be said for rescuing sweetness out of the political quagmire of the last four years. The world is rising in temperature too. So whether we like it or believe it, there’s boiling on the way.
Some of my closest relationships boiled over during the summer but others found their sweetness at last. That’s what the boiling is good for, after all.
Waste nothing - waste no argument, no heat, no already used pot, no leftover honey or jam, not even a slick of butter. Let that extra indulgence of good oil sit on your hip for the winter that will come. Waste nothing.
So waste nothing of the orange. The only way to enjoy all of it, leaving nothing behind - no pith, no bitter pip, no waxy rind or ounce of nectar is to boil it. The boiling softens every part of the fruit to almost the same texture. The sweetness soaks from the inside out until each part is equally laden with flavourful oil and sugar.
Here is the aspect, the perspective I am keen to impart - we ought not to waste anything of ourselves or each other. It is not enough to say we love when we only carve out some part of a human we can love. It is not enough to say we have grace when we spare only the sweet. Boil it all, til it becomes whole. We must love each other as whole people. We must boil our oranges, not pick them to pieces.
After a few hours, the work is done. You can crush the orange by hand but I like to ladle them gently into a blender, taking advantage of the orange oil steam facial while I do it. Who needs perfume when you have made an alchemy of all things?
Blitz then pour into beaten eggs, almond flour and a pinch of baking powder. You need nothing else but to pour it into a tin and bake slowly, giving them relief from the violence of boiling for 45min.
I have found no other bitter fruit that takes to this magic of prolonged heat and water as well as the orange. But that is enough, because I can make a cake that requires no sugar yet is the sweetest of all. Imagine that.
In these recent years, it’s been easy to feel like an orange who doesn’t realise the boiling will make it all sweet again. Resisting the pot, holding on to the pith. Drying up and becoming less useful rather than finding our way in that boiling, rolling pot. But we’ve been boiling all this time anyway. We just need to get into the water to be made sweet.
For me, I have remembered some boundaries I didn’t have to keep when I was travelling on the other side of the world. I didn’t need the boiling to keep things sweet so much. This summer has been a good reminder to not waste the pith but to incorporate it instead and to keep loving whole people.
As for other words and oranges..
I’m embarking on a creative #100Days project called #42wordpoem over on Instagram. If they prove popular, I’ll likely share them elsewhere.
The premise of the project is to create a project with a set of rules to make it simple and provide some construct. Then complete the work and share it for 100 Days.
Here are my rules:
Write a poem of 42 words, no more or less
It must be written on an item or aspect of the day
It must be written in a single session
I will then illustrate a background in Adobe Draw
Publish the poem
Here’s one I quite like from today - a study on gratitude for the day and all its imperfections.
Like this idea about oranges? Tell me what you think or share it with someone else.