Nimboo curd

As a child, I was quite sure that the old nursery rhyme telling what little girls were made of should have been amended to include lemons, sugar, butter and eggs — the heavenly quartet that makes lemon curd. And my mother’s confection, tangy, creamy and golden, was, and is, one of the finest curds to come out of a kitchen.

In my memory, however, it is the lime that is inextricably linked with the start of the hot weather on the plains of India. So here are limes instead of lemons in