Eating tangerines is the perfect way to feel in your chest the explosion of joie de vivre that comes from traveling the world in a Hawaiian shirt, without having to go through the embarrassment of wearing it. Especially now that it’s colder.
Like little boxes of stored summer sun tablets or flashlights to get you through the winter darkness, tangerines smell like an outdoor wedding, waxed boat wood, colorful lanterns on cherry branches, and lying on the couch in your pajamas listening to Belle and Sebastian. Due to their childish nature, they are too sweet to be taken seriously. You’ve never seen a senior executive eating tangerines during an end-of-quarter earnings review meeting. If that happened, the presentation would instantly show, projected onto the living room wall, the image of that man crouching in the schoolyard, with the sleeves of his robe rolled up, intently observing a row of ants.
Mandarins are not fruits. They’re candy. And they usually come with a free toy: those little skin stickers, clipped onto your fingertips, make for gorgeous designer nails.
Plus, they’re busy parents’ best friends. When they walk through the front door, the responsibility of preparing a snack for the little ones disappears: from November to March, two mandarins sleep in every school backpack in the world.
Accustomed as we are to taking for granted that the grass is green and that flowers turn into fruit, none of this impresses us. As if the transformation of sunlight into tangerines, through roots, trunks, leaves, bees, enzymes, and time, were not as mind-blowing and astonishing to behold as the migration of whales, the Northern Lights, the exploding of a star, or the careful, labored gesture of a preschooler’s fingers as he strings macaroni onto a thin string to create a necklace.
At my house we buy them in five kilo boxes. And it is no exaggeration to say that we eat the pulp almost as a formality. Their skin is perfect for scaring the cat, who seems to be taken aback every time by the explosions of essential oils that come out of the pores of those orange balls when you peel them. The same skin, properly dried and placed on the radiators in the corridor, is ideal as fuel for lighting a fire. A thousand times better than those pills with the nauseating petrol smell.
Fresh and dry, the peel of this citrus fruit is the basis of my favorite infusion, the perfect remedy for when the cold and sadness have taken over your body and you are weak and soft, and more than feeling better, you would like to curl up in a soft blanket of self-pity, complain and sigh loudly, and be loved and cherished.
To prepare it, all you need is the well-rinsed peels of three mandarins, two or three peeled slices of ginger and four tablespoons of brown sugar or honey. Boil all the ingredients in a pot with the exact amount of almost a liter of water, the time necessary for some of the water to evaporate and leave more than half a liter of broth in the pot, but less than three quarters. Even if you turn on the exhaust fan, in no time the fumes will fill the house with the scent of sweets in a tin box. You will feel the need to lower all the shutters, turn off all the lights and leave only the bedside lamp on. Succumb.
Pour the very hot liquid through a fine strainer into your favorite ceramic mug. Carry it to the couch holding it with both hands and the bow of someone holding a ceremonial bowl. Take it in small fiery sips, wrapped tightly in thick blankets, and surrender to sweat, sweat, and sweat until you fall asleep. You will wake up after two hours feeling much better.
There will be those who criticize this recipe, warning that, with so much boiling, the vitamin C that that mandarin peel could have contained will have been destroyed, and all its healing power, deactivated. We won’t listen to them.
It is not the vitamin C that is healing and powerful in this infusion. They are the aroma, the flavour, the temperature, the decision to dedicate that time and space to that rhythm, and what is mystical ritual in the action of preparing a magic potion and drinking it in a room which, suddenly, in the dim light of a single bulb covered by a handkerchief, is the inside of a cave. No virus can hit you. Because now you’re a bear.
Gastro Special from ‘El País Semanal’
This report is part of the Gastro Special prepared by “El País Semanal” and EL PAÍS Gastro, which will be published in its paper edition on Sunday 23 November.
