These lemon-poppy seed bars are the stuff of dreams

Growing up with poppy seed bagels, hamantaschen and muffins, I never realised that those little specks stuck in my teeth had anything to do with the louche haze of opium dens or the soporific scarlet fields of Oz.

- MELISSA CLARK

I figured there must be different poppies — one the stuff of muffins and cake, the other for trapping little girls like Dorothy in morphine oblivion. But they are one and the same.

It's one of nature’s clever little metaphors that the seed pods of Papaver somniferum, as the opium poppy is known scientifically, ooze a sticky, intoxicating latex when young and green, yet shed their narcotic properties entirely as they ripen and mature. That's when the tiny blue-black seeds are harvested, without so much as a hint of their younger, dreamier selves.