The other night, I made Claudia Roden’s famous boiled orange cake. So much more wonderful than that rather prosaic description suggests, this cake is the stuff of legends in the recipe world. Variations on its theme in cookbooks are invariably accompanied by an introduction reassuring you that you need not be sceptical of boiling two oranges in their entirety then folding their pulverised forms into a cake batter: the result is a delectably moist, fragrant cake packed with citrus aroma and the moreish (and, indeed, Moorish) hit of slight bitterness that only boiled orange rind can provide.

Felicity Cloake, in her Guardian ‘Perfect’ column from 2017, argues that neither tangerines nor navel oranges ‘can touch the gloriously tangy Seville for flavour’ in this cake: during their short season, ‘you can’t beat them’. Luckily for me, it happens to be Seville orange season. So why did I make this cake the other night using two rather sad, bullet-hard sour oranges from the freezer, when in my fridge’s salad draw sat an entire drawstring bag full of fresh Sevilles?