I have it on good authority that his recipe for key lime pie requires one to actually go to Key West to gather the limes.
Most of the key limes we get on this side of the country come from either Mexico or Central America.
I do have a wee bias in favour of fresh over bottled or tinned. This Christmastide, I made blood orange and pomegranate sorbet for a party of about fifty persons. Getting the juice out of the blood oranges was no problem. I have a lovely chrome bartender's citrus squeezer that looks like a prop in a 40's movie set in a cocktail lounge. Getting the juice out of the pomegranates was a great challenge. I ended up cutting them in half and then using a wooden device, like a reamer, with a pointy end and sort of serrated sides, shaped a bit like a long skinny handgrenade. I then smushed up the seeds and juice with a potato masher, strained it through a chinois and made sorbet. Perhaps one of the reasons I remember the process so well is that my sweet bride is still finding the occasional stain of pomegranate juice on some distant wall in the kitchen. It was everywhere!
