Produce

Limes

Persian limes, the standard variety sold in most US grocery stores, are seedless and larger than Key limes, which are smaller, more aromatic, and traditionally used in Key lime pie.

Lime juice's acidity plays the same functional roles lemon juice does — preventing browning on cut fruit and providing the acid for a proper dressing emulsion or a ceviche's chemical "cooking" of raw seafood.

Limes tend to dry out and shrivel slightly faster than lemons at room temperature, which is part of why refrigeration is generally the more reliable storage choice for limes specifically.

British sailors earned the nickname "limeys" after the Royal Navy began issuing lime or lemon juice rations to prevent scurvy on long voyages, a practice formalized following James Lind's 1747 shipboard experiments demonstrating that citrus fruit could treat and prevent the vitamin C deficiency that had killed thousands of sailors on extended sea journeys.

Key lime pie takes its name from the small, intensely tart Key lime traditionally grown in the Florida Keys, and the dessert's classic filling — canned sweetened condensed milk mixed with lime juice and egg yolks, poured into a graham cracker crust — became necessary specifically because fresh milk was historically hard to keep on the isolated, un-refrigerated Keys before better transport and refrigeration reached the islands.

A disease called citrus greening (huanglongbing), spread by a small insect and incurable once a tree is infected, has devastated lime and other citrus groves across Florida and parts of Mexico over the past two decades, a real factor behind the periodic lime price spikes and supply shortages that have made national news more than once.

Lime pickle, made by curing whole or cut limes in salt, oil, and a blend of spices over weeks until the rind softens and the flavor turns intensely sour and savory, is a staple condiment across much of India, served in small amounts alongside a meal the way a Western diner might use a dab of mustard or hot sauce.

The margarita's exact origin is genuinely disputed among several competing bartender-invention stories from the 1930s and 1940s in Mexico and the American Southwest, but lime juice's sharp acidity balancing tequila and orange liqueur has been central to the drink in essentially every version of that history.

Ceviche, raw fish or seafood "cooked" chemically in citrus juice rather than heat, relies specifically on lime across much of Latin America's Pacific coast, from Peru to Mexico, where the fruit's acidity denatures the proteins and firms up the flesh in a way that mimics the texture change heat would otherwise produce.

Elote, Mexican street corn grilled and coated with mayonnaise, cotija cheese, chili powder, and a generous squeeze of lime juice, is one of many Mexican street-food dishes where lime's sharp acidity is added at the very end specifically to cut through the dish's richer, creamier components.