BrainStuff Classics: How Did a Parisian Lemonade Craze Fight the Plague?

While the black plague ravaged the rest of France, Paris remained relatively untouched -- and they may have had their fondness for lemonade to thank. Learn why in this classic episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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,

(00:22):
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

(00:45):
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

(01:05):
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

(01:26):
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.

(01:47):
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

(02:07):
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

(02:30):
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

(02:51):
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

(03:12):
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

(03:33):
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

(03:54):
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

(04:15):
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