So, uh. Note to future me:

Don’t schedule three sales on your existing book, cover finalizing on two more books, final book generation on a ready-to-launch book, and writing the last 2-3 chapters on the first piece of a trilogy for the same week as the start of the university semester ever, EVER again, got it?

(The whimpering sound you hear is the faltering remnants of my coping mechanisms.)

I have probably gone off the wall with fifty pages of bonus recipes in the back of Haroun. But there’s a whole marketplace full of delicious nibbles, and Upaja’s cauldrons, and Grandmother’s karkadeh for good boys and good girls who are much too innocent to drink her kumiss. I wanted a lot of fun stuff to counterbalance the less-fun parts of the notes about living with multiple disabilities and how that informs both Haroun’s method of navigating a world he can’t see and Madhur’s method of navigating a world without motor vehicles when he owns very little other than his priest-cloths and his walking stick.

Anyhow, I’m trying to wrap up the business-and-advertising pieces with my three-hours-of-sleep brain in order to unplug everything and force myself to finish off the three chapters that have been fighting me since June. It’s tricky to figure out exactly where to land Chai and Charmcraft’s plot plane when it’s the first book of a trilogy, you have to leave certain connections unresolved for the next two books to have launch points, you also have to have a satisfying-for-this-book pause point, and your main character is a prophet!

So, if the universe does not laugh too loudly (I say while knocking on both wood and my skull to avert mishaps), I’m hoping to release (or unleash) Haroun on September 13.

That’s if the proof prints come in acceptably and if I haven’t too badly bolloxed up the existence of both an Amazon paperback and a Draft2Digital-to-many-places-and-it-might-try-to-horn-in-on-Amazon-I-don’t-know-yet paperback with different ISBNs which I have heard both “it’s fine” and “you have set yourself up for an irretrievable and expensive identity hairball” about from different sources?

I would very much like to make paperbacks available to libraries who won’t buy from Amazon! But if this all goes sideways, the non-Amazon edition is going to be what has to go. 95% of my sales come from Amazon, and less than 1% of those are paperback. So if I get caught in the middle of Dueling Paperbacks, 1% of 5% means I’m unlikely to sell more than one non-Amazon paperback every five to ten years, and at that point it’s not worth the bureaucratic combat.

So, a pickle recipe sounds very, very appropriate for the current situation, wouldn’t you say? Somehow “pickle” is turning out to be frequently associated with “paperback complications” in my life!

Salted Lemon Pickles

Salted lemon pickles are a staple ingredient across much of the lemon-producing swathe of the world, from California to Africa to Vietnam. We find recipes from the tenth century onward, and I’m pretty sure they were making them before anyone wrote it down in a copy that survived.

Nawal Nasrallah’s Treasure Trove’s recipe 607 in the Google Scholar preview is very like Daniel Newman’s Sultan’s Feast recipe 226, and these are very similar to how I’ve seen modern bloggers describe the making of salted lemons: cutting them in quarters and covering with salt and lemon juice and then topping with olive oil (or otherwise making sure the jar is full and airless).

Out of spoons? You can buy jars of salt preserved lemons online as well!

The Sultan’s Feast recipe 226 says: “Score lemons crosswise and fill the cuts with salt. Layer the lemons on a platter and weigh them down with stones. Cover and leave for three days [Kanz 607 says two]. Then take them out, put in a large glass jar and take the liquid. Dye it with saffron and take out the pips. If you want [more] lemon juice, add some. Then tightly pack everything in a jar, making sure [the lemons] are immersed. Seal with good quality olive oil, put a lid on top, and store.”

Some key details here:

• You need a lot of salt. Probably more salt than you’d guess. Kosher salt or sea salt is better than iodized salt for this purpose; medieval cookbook writers didn’t have iodized salt.
• You need a lot of lemon juice too. They really do need to be submerged. A pickling weight can help keep them under the surface. (You can get the extra juice from standard lemons since you won’t be eating the peel of those.) Because the peels are included and most Western recipes assume you aren’t eating the lemon peel, you may want to look for organic lemons to avoid pesticides and preservational waxes applied to the surface of standard lemons.
• If you can find doqq, boussera, or Meyer lemons, which are generally small and round they’ll have thinner pith and more flesh than the longer and pointier varieties of lemon.

Christine Benlafquih of Taste of Maroc has an excellent article with helpful photographs of both homemade and market-bought salted lemons at different lengths of pickling. I admit I’m one of those not-in-plastic purists, though, and a pint or quart Mason jar is easier for me to calibrate by than “whatever your nearest empty container happens to be.”

For one quart or two pint jars, ideally sterilized before use:

• 6-12 Meyer lemons or similar round lemons, preferably organic
• Additional lemon juice from whatever’s handy, possibly a cup or more
• A couple cups kosher or sea salt (non-iodized)
• Saffron if you’d like Even More Yellow
• Optional but helpful: Two nesting glass or ceramic bowls that fit together neatly, or two plates with a lip to catch juices, very clean
• Optional: Olive oil to separate the lemon juice from the top of the jar(s), if the jar lids are metal rather than glass or plastic

Wash and dry your lemons thoroughly to remove any contaminants from travel.

Cut your lemons in quarters, not quite all the way through.

Scatter a couple tablespoons of salt in the bottom of your bowls if you have them, or your pickling jar(s) if you don’t.

Coat every surface of your lemon with salt, including stuffing the insides of the cuts.

If you have nesting bowls or plates and want to try the Sultan’s Feast edition, spread your to-be-pickled lemons among the salt in the lower bowl, then place the upper bowl on top of them and weight with a couple cans (or rocks). Keep in a cool, clean place (refrigerator recommended) for a couple of days.

When your weights have pressed some juice out of the lemons into the salt, transfer everything – lemons, juice, salt, and all – to your pickling jars.

(If you don’t have the nesting bowls / plates arrangement or want to get things refrigerated sooner, just begin the whole process in the pickling jars, in which case skip straight to the step below.)

Layer salt and lemons in the jar, pressing down firmly as you go to compress them and remove empty air. Add more salt and more lemons until you can’t fit any more in, but make sure the last lemon is below the surface of the jar so that it can be covered.

If you’d like to add Even More Yellow, this would be a good time to sprinkle a few saffron threads in.

Pour over as much lemon juice as is needed to submerge the lemons.

If your jar lid is metal rather than glass, you’ll want to separate the acidic lemon juice from the jar lid somehow. The Treasure Trove suggests topping the jar off with olive oil, but then you can’t move the jar much until you plan to use it. One modern recipe suggested using a piece of waxed paper to separate the lemon juice from a metal lid. Some glass jars come with swing top glass lids and rubber gaskets that wouldn’t need the acid protection, but air is your enemy here, so you do want the jar as airless as possible until you decide to use your lemons.

Refrigerators didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, but they do now, and they’ll buy you time to eat through your lemon stash. Because they’re so tart and salty, you may want to rinse the salt off before eating them. Some people dispose of the flesh and mince just the rind for use in cooking.