A ZEST FOR LIFE

CHEF LETITIA CLARK TELLS ELLA WALKER WHY SHE CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF ITALIAN LEMONS

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"I'VE been scheming this book ever since I moved to Italy," says food writer Letitia Clark, sounding really quite dastardly about it.

Anchovies, spaghetti and lemons are, to her, the heart of Italian cooking, and she'd happily write single subject books on all three.

But lemons had to come first, hence her new cookbook, For the Love of Lemons. As a former pastry chef, the citrus fruit was intrinsic to making all the sweet things in her "pastry canon" and they're also a bit of a family obsession.

"My grandma and my mum - my main cooking influences - were passionate about lemons. My grandma used to put the classic plastic Jif lemon on my pancakes when I was little and my mum has been trying to grow her own lemon tree since I was a child," says Devon-born Letitia. "I remember her having this very sad sapling sitting in the corner that never fruited. She sent me a photo one time of her first-ever lemon, which was about the size of a hazelnut!"

Her summer holidays were usually spent in cheap and cheerful destinations like Cornwall, but when Clark's family did go somewhere sunny, "I remember my mum making my dad screech the car to a halt and jumping out to pick up lemons that had fallen on the ground."

Letitia has lived in Sardinia for the past seven years and sees lemon trees every day, and yet, "whenever I see a lemon tree I'm like, 'Oooh, every single time!' she says with a laugh.

She calls the mouth-puckering fruits "Christmas baubles", an apt description when they are in season during winter.

She continues: "The trees are so laden, they might have no leaves on but they have four billion lemons just dangling there, and they look so heavy on these delicate branches. It just feels like a feat of nature that they can even grow like that."