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