an incomparable lemon bar

and how lemons brighten the world

Before we get into today’s newsletter (on lemons!), I wanted to welcome the hundreds of new subscribers who’ve found their way here from my essay in the Atlantic. You can expect a similar — though significantly less formal and less edited — vibe from this newsletter. For longstanding Bite into this readers: I somehow managed to convince an editor over there to let me explore what makes the Kitchen Aid stand mixer so iconic and enduring, so you can check that out here if you’re interested.

I wrote today’s missive from my parents’ dining room table, watching my dad whip up yeasted Belgian waffles for Sunday brunch while their new puppy chewed on some cardboard at my feet. I was there for about a week to help them with the aforementioned pup, and when I’m there I don’t cook much, settling more into a prep chef type of role where I chop shallots and leeks, wash a handful of dishes, contribute an idea or two to the meal-planning, and use the energy normally reserved for “must feed myself” to play around with crazy ideas for desserts.

There’s so much weight lifted when I know I’m going to be fed. Space opens for creative food energy.

meeting family ghosts in the kitchen

This week, I channeled the energy into ice-cream making. I’ve been noticing an abundance of gelato, granita, and old-fashioned ice cream recipes in all of my favorite books — the Zuni Cafe Cookbook, Marcella Hazan’s books, and even Odette Williams’ Simple Pasta (which is so cheap on Amazon right now). I don’t have an ice cream maker, I don’t know anyone who has ever made ice cream before, and as I hope this newsletter attracts down-to-earth people who are maybe a bit nerdy about food but mostly just love to eat, I will not be writing you a recipe for ice cream when we live in a universe with a ridiculous amount of the stuff available all of the time.

(I will save my full rant about luxury ice cream for a different day, but I would love a world with more mom + pop shops and less Van Leeuwen. You can’t get anything crazy like a sundae or a banana split or a milkshake anymore because one little scoop of lemon poppy seed — that’s a real flavor — costs 8 freaking dollars. Related to that idea, here’s a newsletter from last summer on my desperate quest for a good spiral of vanilla soft-serve.)

That being said, I did make banana ice cream, raspberry sorbet, and clementine-orange-lemon Italian ice with my dad’s very nice ice cream machine this past week. (The ice cream machine was a gift from me and my brothers years ago and has been gathering dust since we bought it, illustrating just how purposeless such a gadget is for even the nerdiest of home cooks.) I learned that an egg white added to a sorbet makes the texture creamy and fluffy. I learned that banana ice cream makes a really great waffle topping. And I learned that the juice and zest of clementines, oranges, and lemons, when combined with simple syrup, transforms into the most luscious, creamy, mysteriously citrusy Italian ice. It tasted like what I imagine the air in Capri tastes like, having never been to Italy. It tasted like summer on a spoon.

While you can’t replicate that Italian ice at home unless you’ve got a Marcella Hazan book and an ice cream machine (if you have those things, you MUST try it), you can easily bake something else that tastes like summer. You can bake a lemon dessert.

Those who know me know I’ve got a bit of a lemon obsession. I keep a bag of lemons in my fridge at all times. Once, someone told me they thought my lemon-buying habits were excessive and snobby; they said something along the lines of: “Wow, I wish I could afford to do that. But I’m just too economical and practical.” I still get upset when I think about that because, a) what a weird thing to be judging, and b) you can afford to buy a bag of lemons. Lemons are nature’s condiment. They don’t cost nearly as much as something you’d buy in a bottle, they’re versatile, they have widespread cooking and baking applications, and they make the most basic vegetable or fish or whatever meal taste a lot better without any significant effort or cost. Adding salt is one way to improve a bland dish, but adding a squeeze or two of lemon is even easier. (I’ve been thinking a lot about how Bon Appetit, NYT Cooking, etc. are leaning super hard into the miso/harissa/gochujang on and in everything theme, and I think some of their dishes would be a lot better if they took a step back and just added lemon — or limes — instead.)

i'm always stealing lemons from trees, preserving them, taking pictures of them, generally being obsessed. I think I like the Mt. Joy song "lemon tree" because of the name more than anything else.

We don’t celebrate the lemon enough. I usually like to dive through the history and some science about my particular subject in this newsletter, but when it comes to lemons there’s too much of it to be worth the effort. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for lemons: It’s incoherent. It’s hard to say anything cohesive, other than lemons are really important and have been for a long time. The world grew 20.8 million tons of them last year, and they aren’t even a consumable food by themselves.

I may write about lemons in savory applications a different day, but I think that

Alison Roman

has pushed that point so thoroughly that it might not be worth the effort. She’s so obsessed with them in her recipes that if you need education in terms of adding lemon to your cooking, I recommend starting there.

So today, I’m giving you a recipe for lemon bars.

Lemon bars are one of the most transportive desserts you can make in this late winter to early spring transition period, when everything is grey and no fruits are in season aside from old storage apples. We’re no longer in the cold depths that demand rich chocolate cakes, but we’re not yet at the time of year where you can frenetically switch from strawberry shortcake to cherry pie to peach crumble. Lemon desserts will lift and open your palette in this staid little moment.

I could write about lemon cake, or tart, or pie, but I have been blessed with a recipe for lemon bars that is better than anything you can get in a store. This is one of the easiest things I know how to make. There are others who have mastered the classic lemon desserts far better than I, but the lemon bar — here I have some claim to fame. I can promise that people really love me for my lemon bars, and they will love you just as much when you make them.

Actually, I can’t claim real credit for this recipe. My lemon bar is a modified version of a recipe that made its way into my family via a handmade recipe book from the Mom’s Club in Chester County, Pennsylvania. When I was a small child, my mom took the lemon bar recipe in that book and started to edit it a bit, ending up with the image below. I haven’t ever seriously deviated from her instructions, but in the typed-out recipe, you can see how my thinking shapes the final result of the lemon bar. I’ve endeavored to make the instructions a bit more detailed, as I know that something as vague as this little messy picture could be hard to follow for a less experienced baker.

the lemon bar recipe from the mom’s club book, annotated and stained by my mom over many years.

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Lemon Bars

Fills one 9 x 13 inch pan, cut into whatever sized bars you like

Ingredients

For the shortbread base

2 cups of all-purpose flour

1/2 cup of confectioner’s sugar

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

1 cup of unsalted butter (2 sticks in the US), cold, cut into small pieces

For the lemon topping

4 eggs

1 and 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/4 all-purpose flour

1/3 cup lemon juice (usually about 2 lemons)

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

A sprinkling of confectioner’s sugar

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Grease a 9x13 inch baking pan with butter, preferably a glass pan if you have it.

3. Begin with the shortbread base: Mix together the salt, confectioner’s sugar, and flour in a bowl.

4. Add the cut up pieces of butter to the bowl and work them in with your fingers, mixing the butter into the flour/confectioner’s sugar mix and then pressing it into flakes, like you would if you’ve ever made pie dough or pastry crust by hand. You’re trying to press the butter into the dry ingredients until it’s evenly distributed, working it with your hands until you get little pea-sized bits of floury butter. Work quickly so the butter doesn’t melt in your hands — it’s okay if there are still some small butter chunks within this mixture.

5. Dump this mixture into your greased 9x13 pan and press it down as evenly as you can — this is your shortbread base for the bars.

6. Bake the shortbread base for about 20 minutes, until it starts to brown at the top. This may vary depending on the material your pan is made of, anywhere from 15-25 minutes, so just watch for browning and pull it out when it starts to brown across the top.

7. While the shortbread base is baking, mix your lemon top together. Begin about 10 minutes before you take out the shortbread base.

8. Whisk 4 eggs in a medium sized bowl.

9. Combine all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl.

10. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the eggs and whisk.

11. Add the mixture of flour, baking powder, and salt to the egg-sugar-lemon juice mixture and whisk to combine.

12. Once you pull the shortbread base from the oven, gently pour your lemon topping over the shortbread base and return to the oven. Be careful not to slosh it around too much when you’re pouring and returning to the oven, because if it hits too high up on the sides of the pan, those side edges will burn a little while the middle is cooking.

13. Bake for another 20-25 minutes, until the middle is no longer wet and jiggly.

14. Once cooled, sprinkle the top with confectioners sugar. I like to put a little bit into a mesh strainer and tap it over the top to get a nice even snowy coating.

15. Cut into bars and serve. Will keep covered for many days, but do not refrigerate.

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That’s all for this week! In early editions of this newsletter, I used to include some D.C. restaurant recommendations for the locals, but you lovely readers are now so widespread that it seems a bit silly. You can let me know your thoughts with this little poll, send me a DM, leave a comment, or email me by replying to this newsletter.

To sign us off, here’s some pictures of the new family puppy, who could make me do basically anything with that sweet little face…

her name is Cherry and she is a sweet pie