Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and today we've got
Speaker 1: another classic episode for you. This one is about how
Speaker 1: a coincidental fad for lemonade may have once saved Paris
Speaker 1: from an outbreak of the Black Plague. Hey there, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb. Here in the seventeenth century, a return
Speaker 1: of plague, also known as the Black Death, killed about
Speaker 1: one million people in France. Oddly enough, the residents of
Speaker 1: Paris were largely unaffected, despite having the same rat problem
Speaker 1: as any other large city. The rodents carried fleas that
Speaker 1: bore the plague. After the plague killed the rats, the
Speaker 1: fleas often hopped onto human hosts. In this way, the
Speaker 1: plague spread like wildfire, snuffing out life after life. The
Speaker 1: Parisian's miraculous avoidance of the plague could have remained one
Speaker 1: of history's mysteries, but author Tom Neelin squeezed a potential
Speaker 1: explanation out of seemingly desperated events. A purveyor of rares,
Speaker 1: Neilon is not only a connoisseur of history, but of
Speaker 1: the impact the condiments and food stuffs may have had
Speaker 1: on antiquity. His new book of Food Fights and Culture
Speaker 1: Wars follows these sometimes surprising influence food has had throughout history.
Speaker 1: Neilan says health and food were intimately connected for the
Speaker 1: longest time. Early collections of recipes frequently mixed medical and
Speaker 1: cookery receipts, as recipes were called, so it's easy to
Speaker 1: start to conflate them when you're studying the period and
Speaker 1: old cookbooks even after they started to separate. The Renaissance
Speaker 1: Book of Secrets kept elements of food and home remedies
Speaker 1: together for centuries longer. In the case of Paris and
Speaker 1: it's largely unscathed population in the sixteen hundreds, the timing
Speaker 1: of a lemonade trend and the timing of a plague coincided,
Speaker 1: and Neilan wondered whether it was more than a coincidence.
Speaker 1: Up until the sixteen hundreds, lemons had been a rare
Speaker 1: and expensive fruit. All the lemon trees had been cultivated
Speaker 1: throughout Europe and Asia in the preceding decades, and a
Speaker 1: few recipes using lemon as an ingredient had emerged. The
Speaker 1: citrus fruit was a little used in England and France,
Speaker 1: both because of cost and the notion that eating raw
Speaker 1: lemons was harmful. Then an increase in trade and a
Speaker 1: fascination with lemonade popularized the tart fruit, so that by
Speaker 1: the mid sixteen hundreds it was widely available. Nielan explains,
Speaker 1: during the Renaissance, lemons had been bread and domesticated enough,
Speaker 1: and trade had become organized enough that lemons were sufficiently
Speaker 1: inexpensive in the mid seventeenth century to import in bulk.
Speaker 1: Lemonade was all the fashion in a number of cities
Speaker 1: in Italy at the time, especially Rome, and the fad
Speaker 1: spread from there. The cookbook liquis ineur Francois, published in
Speaker 1: sixteen fifty one and written by chef Francois Pierre Lavarenne,
Speaker 1: is considered one of the founding texts of modern French cuisine.
Speaker 1: It included a recipe that combined lemon juice, water and sugar.
Speaker 1: This recipe also contributed to the popularity of lemonade in France.
Speaker 1: And with all this lemonade came lots and lots of
Speaker 1: lemon peels. Lemon peels were everywhere, in the garbage, in
Speaker 1: the gutter, in the river, anywhere that you could find rats.
Speaker 1: It was this tuitous combination of rats and lemon peels
Speaker 1: that may have stopped the spread of plague. Lemon peels
Speaker 1: contain lemoning, a natural ingredient that kills flea larvae and
Speaker 1: adult fleas. The more people that made lemonade and discarded
Speaker 1: the lemon peels, the more the rats nibbled on the peels,
Speaker 1: inadvertently ingesting lemoning and killing fleas and their eggs. Neil
Speaker 1: And says the lemoning disrupted the spread of fleas from
Speaker 1: the rats to people because the plague kills so quickly,
Speaker 1: the fleas needed to move from rats to people back
Speaker 1: to rats over and over again to keep it going
Speaker 1: as their hosts expired. Lemoning, a flea killer that is
Speaker 1: still broadly used in pet treatments, killed the fleas and
Speaker 1: prevented the chain from getting going. At the time, and
Speaker 1: four centuries after the plague subsided, the survival of Parisians
Speaker 1: was attributed to an airing out of goods blankets, bedsheets,
Speaker 1: clothes that had been quarantined. At the time. It was
Speaker 1: mistakenly believed that the illness traveled by air, when it
Speaker 1: was really the rats and fleas traveling with the quarantined
Speaker 1: goods that were at the root of the plague. If
Speaker 1: not for Parisians love of lemonade, many more may have
Speaker 1: met a tragic end. Today's episode was written by Laurie L.
Speaker 1: Dove and produced by Tristan McNeil and Tyler Clang. For
Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of
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