Fresh-squeezed orange juice

   

     Few sounds are as welcome as a juicer. That pulpy grinding noise, and liquid whir. I'm not awash in golden childhood memories, but one of them is lying in bed in the morning in the summertime  and hearing that sound wafting in from the kitchen and knowing my mother is making fresh-squeezed orange juice to go with breakfast.
     Fresh-squeezed is the only kind worth drinking. There was a cylinder of frozen concentrate, you'd plop into a pitcher and add water then mash it into a semblance of orange juice. But even as a child I could sense it was hardly worth drinking and, frankly, I haven't had it in so many years it came as a surprise to discover it's still sold in stores.

      And Tang, the powdered orange juice-like drink — also still sold, amazingly, though it seems mostly sold in foreign countries, where they don't know any better. The stuff was festooned with space age pretensions, fooling no one. I haven't drunk it in 50 years and still can't think of Tang without a visceral shiver. 

    The lure of freshly squeezed orange juice is what sends John McPhee on the journey that becomes his classic book of reportage, "Oranges." The book opens by commenting on the supposed rarity of the predilection: 

     "The custom of drinking orange juice with breakfast is not very widespread, taking the world as a whole, and is thought by many peoples to be a distinctly American habit."

    McPhee later contradicts that notion by pointing out that oranges show up four times in Shakespeare, and frank English diarist Samuel Pepys had his first glass on March 9, 1669, noting, "I drank a glass, of a pint, I believe, of the juice of oranges, of whose peel they make confits, and here they drink the juice as wine, with sugar, and it is a very fine drink; but, it being new, I was doubtful whether it might not do me hurt." (You might remember Pepys from the relapse chapter of "Out of the Wreck I Rise," where he too often had no such reluctance in quaffing far more than a glass of wine, though it was definitely doing him hurt). 

    In the book, McPhee heads to Florida. He assumes, once he gets there, that the sun-washed Floridians will be partaking in the orange abundance all around them. They don't. As soon as he checks into his Winter Haven motel, he goes in search of fresh orange juice: 

     "Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, spreading over its parking lot. I went in for dinner, and, since I would be staying for some time and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood, I checked on the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. 'Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something,' she said. 'Frozen is the same every day. People want to know what they’re getting.' She seemed to know her business, and I began to sense what turned out to be the truth — that I might as well stop asking for fresh orange juice, because few restaurants in Florida serve it."   

     Fresh juice is dismissed because it is "less consistent" (as is wine, McPhee observes). McPhee doesn't have to bother laying out how ashamed he is of his fellow Americans; instead he hurries to a hardware store, buys a hand reamer and a knife, and sets to making orange juice himself out of the fruit plucked from trees.
     The path of the purist is never easy.
     As much as I love fresh-squeezed orange juice, I stopped making it, for years. Fell out of the habit, mainly because grocery stores didn't generally sell juice oranges. I guess it takes too long, and the bottled varieties are good enough. Plus my wife doesn't particularly like it.

     But we started patronizing the Russian grocery, Fresh Farms Market on Milwaukee, and they sell Valencia oranges, and I began to buy a dozen, and occasionally take a break from my standard grapefruit to go with a glass of OJ. Heaven.

     Then diabetes hit — over three months ago — and fruit juice was forbidden as an unacceptable jolt of sugar. But as time went by, and I figured out how to adjust my diet and regulate my blood sugar using insulin, I realized that fresh squeezed orange juice had returned to the realm of the possible.

     I waited until the perfect moment — one day last week I was coming back from walking Kitty just as my blood glucose was beginning to tank into unacceptable levels. I set her up with her breakfast, then popped into the basement to retrieve three likely sacrificial oranges — you can tell by holding them in the flat of your palm, which ones are fat with juice.

     I'm not good enough a writer to describe just how excellent that glass of orange juice tasted after a three month hiatus. I won't say that contracting diabetes was worth it for that one glass of juice. But absence makes the heart grow fonder. And that glass did remind me that it is a joyful, juicy world, no matter who is going to be inaugurated a week from Monday. We mustn't lose sight of that. Being miserable won't shorten his administration by an hour. Enjoy your fresh-squeezed orange juice, if you can. It's worth the effort.

It looks huge in the photo, but it's an eight ounce glass.