Fresh, ripe lemons are easy to extract juice from just by slicing them in half and squeezing by hand, but a simple ‘reamer’ helps. This is usually a wooden device, carved to fit the inner curve of the rind, with a textured surface. A lemon half is held in one hand and the reamer applied with the other. For speed, the reamer shape might have its bottom flattened and be used, single-handed, standing on a flat surface. Hundreds of patents exist for variations on the basic reamer idea.
You’ve almost certainly used one of the glass ones, superbly functional with their little skirt of a saucer built in underneath, and nubby little teeth to catch the pips. They must have been designed after 1946. As, any food writer will tell you, lemons didn’t exist before Elizabeth David discovered them.
There are even electric juicers. Fearsome devices you can feed bags of citrus into and watch the juice stream out. Possibly a time-saver in a hotel kitchen when you’ve got to make fresh squeezed orange juice for breakfast service, but if your barman is squeezing fruit in bulk at the beginning of his shift, it’s time to find a better place to drink.
There is one squeezer though, that sits behind every serious bar that’s absolutely brilliant at wringing out every last drop of juice, without extracting bitterness from pith or peel. It handles a half a fruit at a time, which by remarkable coincidence usually means a very helpful 15g or so from most of the lemons or limes we can get our hands on in the UK.
It’s almost universally referred to as a Mexican Elbow. I say this without guilt, because I’d always called it a lemon-squeezer until my error was explained to me, one night in San Francisco by Encarna Santacruz, a bar-back from Juarez.
You lift up the handle, drop in your halved fruit, cut face down, and squeeze. It couldn’t be more perfect. The domed back of the device squeezes the fruit inside-out against the basket, some arrangement of slots or holes in the bottom filters out pips and bits. A stream of juice squirts straight into the glass and nine times out of ten, nothing squirts in your eye.
There are big versions of this lever arrangement designed to stand on the bench so you can really put some pressure on them but they, too, feel like something you might employ to make buckets of drinking juices. The Mexican elbow is a neat little hand tool that juices an elegant sufficiency, fresh and just when it’s needed.
My own elbow, pictured here, was designed and made by Damian Chandler (@dsjchandler) at his design company Studio Ella (@studio_ella). It’s cast in steel for reassuring heft. The cupped part of the top arm is marked with drinks measures and equipped with pourers, but most importantly it’s slightly bigger than standard. It takes half a large Sicilian lemon or half of a very small orange...
…which is precisely as far as I’m prepared to go in putting bloody fruit in my drink.