Take a little piece of winter into spring by giving the fleeting winter citrus crop—blood oranges, clementines, tangerines - the preserved lemon treatment.

This is the way it always goes: Spring breaks—even just a little, the way it has across much of the country this week—and suddenly, I want to preserve winter. Not the slush. Not the double layered wool socks. But the citrus.

I use preserve literally here. Candying citrus is fine and all, but I want to ferment it—I want to pack it into salt, stuff it into a jar and let it sit for a few weeks. I want the skins to get soft so I can chop them finely and stir them into mayonnaise.

Lemons get all the love on this subject. But this year I found a sentence—a fragment, really—tucked into the headnote of a recipe for preserved lemons in Paul Virant's book The Preservation Kitchen. "You can also use Meyer lemons or orange wedges," he writes.

That sent my mind spinning. I thought of blood oranges, clementines, tangerines—all the varieties of citrus that are the soul of winter. Nothing against regular lemons or anything, but they're here all year round. They're about as indicative of winter as pizza is of the beach, which is to say not at all. But the season for less common varieties is so fleeting.

When I called Eugenia Bone, author of Well Preserved and The Kitchen Ecosystem, she swooned. "Oh yes, Meyer lemons work really well," she told me. "Though sometimes the Meyer lemon peels will get so soft that it will be a little mushy. And that’s okay—instead of being a product that you would chop up, you just use it as a product you dissolve into a sauce."

That issue—thin skins—is probably relevant to clementines, too. But I didn't care. I bought a bag of Meyer lemons, a bag of blood oranges, a crate of clementines and set to work. You can preserve this stuff so many ways—here's a recipe that involves a hot brine—but I always go with the minimalist, 5-step process I gleaned from Mourad Lahlou's book.

1. Scrub and dry the fruit. 2. Slice the fruit into quarters. (Or slice the fruit into quarters but run the knife only three-quarters of the way down, which lets you open the fruit but also keep it in tact.) 3. Sprinkle the flesh with coarse salt (you cannot oversalt here). 4. Pack the fruit into a jar, layering with more salt as you go. 5. Pour in enough lemon juice to keep the fruit submerged.

You can riff on this. You can replace a third of the salt with sugar (which works especially well with sweeter citrus). You can add dried herbs (Virant uses herbes de Provence) or spices (such as cloves). Sometimes, you'll find jars of preserved lemons that have not been cut at all—a tact I took with the clementines, since they are so small and thin-skinned already. One thing I wouldn't do: Swap out the lemon juice in the method above. Blood orange juice, clementine juice...I just don't trust that stuff to have the necessary acid.

Preserved citrus will take about 4 weeks of sitting in a cool, dark place before the skins have softened and mellowed. Shake the jar a few times during those weeks, just to distribute the brine. When they're ready, don't make the mistake I used to of only using the preserved rinds. Use the whole, salty, puckery thing. Virant takes the flesh and stirs it into butter. Bone chops up a whole piece of Meyer lemon and stirs it into risotto, then tops the bowl with soft shell crab.

"In spring, there's nothing better," she says.

You heard the woman. When it comes to spring, all you need is a small piece of winter.