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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey there,

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Speaker 1: brain stuff, Lauren Vogel bomb here. In the seventeenth century,

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Speaker 1: a return of plague, also known as the Black Death,

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Speaker 1: killed about one million people in France. Oddly enough, the

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Speaker 1: residents of Paris were largely unaffected, despite having the same

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Speaker 1: rat problem as any other large city. The rodents carried

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Speaker 1: fleas that bore the plague. After the plague killed the rats,

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Speaker 1: the fleas often hopped onto human hosts. In this way,

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Speaker 1: the plague spread like wildfire, snuffing out life after life.

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Speaker 1: The Parisian's miraculous avoidance of the plague could have remained

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Speaker 1: one of history's mysteries, but author Tom Nielan squeezed a

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Speaker 1: potential explanation out of seemingly desperated events. A purveyor of

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Speaker 1: rare books, Neilon is not only a connoisseur of history,

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Speaker 1: but of the impact that condiments and food stuffs may

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Speaker 1: have had on antiquity. His new book of Food Fights

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Speaker 1: and Culture Wars follows these sometimes surprising influence food has

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Speaker 1: had throughout history. Neilan says health food were intimately connected

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Speaker 1: for the longest time. Early collections of recipes frequently mixed

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Speaker 1: medical and cookery receipts as recipes were called, so it's

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Speaker 1: easy to start to conflate them when you're studying the

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Speaker 1: period and old cookbooks. Even after they started to separate,

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Speaker 1: the Renaissance Book of Secrets kept elements of food and

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Speaker 1: home remedies together for centuries longer in the case of Paris,

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Speaker 1: and it's largely unscathed population. In the sixteen hundreds, the

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Speaker 1: timing of a lemonade trend and the timing of a

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Speaker 1: plague coincided, and Nilan wondered whether it was more than

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Speaker 1: a coincidence. Up until the sixteen hundreds, lemons had been

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Speaker 1: a rare and expensive fruit. All the lemon trees had

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Speaker 1: been cultivated throughout Europe and Asia in the preceding decades,

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Speaker 1: and a few recipes using lemon as an ingredient had emerged.

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Speaker 1: The citrus fruit was a little used in England and France,

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Speaker 1: both because of cost and the notion that eating raw

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Speaker 1: lemons was harmful. Then an increase in trade and a

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Speaker 1: fascination with lemonade popularized the tart fruit, so that by

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Speaker 1: the mid sixteen hundreds it was widely available. Nilan explained,

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Speaker 1: during the Renaissance, lemons had been bread and domesticated enough,

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Speaker 1: and trade had become organized enough that lemons were sufficiently

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Speaker 1: inexpensive in the mid seventeenth century to import in bulk.

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Speaker 1: Lemonade was all the fashion in a number of cities

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Speaker 1: in Italy at the time, especially Rome, and the fad

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Speaker 1: spread from there. The cookbook liquis ineur Francois, published in

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Speaker 1: sixteen fifty one and written by chef Francois Pierre Lavarenne,

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Speaker 1: is considered one of the founding texts of modern French cuisine.

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Speaker 1: It included a recipe that combined lemon juice, water and sugar.

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Speaker 1: This recipe also contributed to the popularity of lemonade in France.

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Speaker 1: And with all this lemonade came lots and lots of

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Speaker 1: lemon peels. Lemon peels were everywhere, in the garbage, in

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Speaker 1: the gutter, in the river, anywhere that you could find rats.

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Speaker 1: It was this fortuitous combination of rats and lemon peels

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Speaker 1: that may have stopped the spread of plague. Lemon peels

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Speaker 1: contain lemoning, a natural ingredient that kills flea larvae and

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Speaker 1: adult fleas. The more people that made lemonade and discarded

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Speaker 1: the lemon peels, the more the rats nibbled on the peel,

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Speaker 1: inadvertently ingesting, lemoning, and killing fleas and their eggs. Neil

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Speaker 1: And says the lemoning disrupted the spread of fleas from

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Speaker 1: the rats to people. Because the plague kills so quickly,

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Speaker 1: the fleas needed to move from rats to people back

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Speaker 1: to rats over and over again to keep it going

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Speaker 1: as their hosts expired. Lemoning, a flea killer that is

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Speaker 1: still broadly used in pet treatments, killed the fleas and

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Speaker 1: prevented the chain from getting going. At the time and

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Speaker 1: four centuries after the plague subsided, the survival of Parisians

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Speaker 1: was attributed to an airing out of goods blankets, bedsheets,

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Speaker 1: clothes that had been quarantined. At the time. It was

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Speaker 1: mistakenly believed that the illness traveled by air, when it

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Speaker 1: was really the rats and fleas traveling with the quarantined

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Speaker 1: goods that were at the root of the plague. If

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Speaker 1: not for Parisians love of lemonade, many more may have

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Speaker 1: met a tragic end. Today's episode was written by Laurie L.

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Speaker 1: Dove and produced by Tristan McNeil. For more on this

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Speaker 1: and lots of other lemony fresh topics, visit our home planet,

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Speaker 1: how stuff dot com