Rarinj/Narinj

Rarinj/narinj is a variety of Seville orange. The fruit has a lovely orangy aroma, very juicy with numerous seeds.

The juice is used instead of lemon juice for salad dressings and in cooking. The skin is thick, bumpy, and bitter. Therefore, one needs to be careful when extracting the juice. In al-Baghdadi’s thirteenth-century Kitab al-Tabeekh (Arberry), a stew recipe called narinjiyya soured with narinj requires that one person peels the fruit and another does the squeezing so that his hand does not pick up the intense bitterness of the peel.