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Calgary Herald food reporter Gwendolyn Richards gives the mighty citrus a starring role in her cookbook, Pucker, which offers more than 100 recipes for sweet desserts, savoury dishes and very drinkable cocktails. We spoke with her about why citrus is having a moment, its international appeal and the difference between lemons and limes.

Have you always loved sour, tart, puckery flavours?

I'm the kid who always picked the lemon dessert over the chocolate one. It's that zing, the tang and the sunshine flavour of the citrus that appeals to me. There's something so refreshing about a lemon meringue pie or a key lime pie that you don't get from chocolate or caramel.

Do you consider citrus to be an underrated ingredient?

It totally is! For 50 cents you can add so much flavour for almost no effort. The thing about citrus is that they're also readily available. Minus the kaffir lime leaves that I use in one recipe, everything in the book can be made with ingredients from your neighbourhood grocery store, no matter where you are. That's what I like about citrus: tons of flavour, totally accessible.

Pucker came out around the same time as cookbook author Jennifer McLagan's Bitter. It seems like there's a shift away from salty and sweet and towards more acidic, tannin-rich notes that never really got much love.

I think chefs get bored really easily and are always looking at different flavours and transforming their recipes. I can see why citrus and acids, which haven't really been embraced before, are now being focused on.

Everyone has a favourite apple variety, but what about oranges? I'm aware that I compared apples to oranges.

I'm not a big orange girl, but I do love a good blood orange. It's not just straight-up sweet and they have a stunning colour. It has a richer, more well-rounded flavour and more tartness.

It's quite remarkable that lemons and limes are used in cuisines all over the world, from Italian to Indian, and Thai to Moroccan.

It's an equal-opportunity ingredient. When I was doing my research, I came across a geographical divide between who uses primarily lemons and who mostly uses limes. Southeast Asia, for example, is very lime-centric while the Mediterranean and North America use mostly lemon. When you get down to Mexico and South America, you see limes again.

Why is that?

I suspect it goes way, way back to when people were trying to grow citrus plants in different climates. The lemon started in southwest Asia and was taken over to Europe and the Mediterranean, so the cuisine developed from that.

I've found myself in situations where a recipe called for lime, but I only have lemons. Can I use them interchangeably?

I'm going to say no, you have to use the citrus that's called for. Lemons and limes get lumped together but when you really taste them, you'll realize they're very different. If you were eating a Thai salad made with lemon, I think you'd notice something that wasn't right.

Is there a way to save a dish or a cocktail when you use too much lemon or lime?

With a cocktail, I'd suggest adding more syrup, or booze or both. Can't go wrong with more booze. For a main dish, it gets trickier. You'd probably need to offset it by adding more of an ingredient. If it was a salad, you can add more greens, but you'd probably add more of the sweetener or the oil to offset the lemon in the dressing.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

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