cooking.nytimes.com

Instead of letting the age-old combination of salt and time tame the bitterness of lemon pith, heat and sugar speed the process along here, pickling the citrus in minutes. Just blanch a thinly sliced lemon to remove some of its bite, then simmer it again in a pot of heavily sugared and salted water. You’ll end up with lemon slivers that are at once salty, sweet, sour and bitter — and far more interesting than they should be given the amount of work that went into them. They get even better when you fry them in oil, letting their flavors caramelize and turn honeyed. This technique works particularly well with Meyer lemons but regular lemons can work, too. If you use this substitution, blanch them in plain water twice before simmering them in the sugar-salt mixture.