In 1668, the Black Death, which had been dormant for 10 years, broke out again in France, posing a great threat to the lives of the inhabitants of Paris. Outbreaks occurred in Normandy and Picardy: first in Suisson and Amiens, and then on the banks of the Seine, in Rouen, downstream of the capital. Everybody knows what that means. Just a few years ago, between 1665 and 1666, London lost more than 100,000 people – almost a quarter of its population – to the plague. Many remember that in 1630, the plague took the lives of nearly a third of Venice's 140,000 inhabitants and nearly half of Milan's 130,000 inhabitants. Panicked, Paris public health officials imposed quarantine and embargo measures in an effort to reduce the damage that could have been done by the inevitable catastrophe, but fortunately the terrible plague did not break out in Paris.
The plague that hung over Paris was the midpoint of the 17th-century European epidemic. Later, the plague continued to spread, leading to the deaths of large numbers of inhabitants of Vienna (80,000 deaths in 1679), Prague (80,000 in 1681) and Malta (11,000 in 1675). Amiens eventually surpassed the death toll of 30,000, and almost no city in France survived — with the exception of Paris, which miraculously and almost unscathed. Often, the more important a city is, the more congested its traffic, the more frequent the population movement, the greater the population density, so the higher the risk of disease transmission and the faster it spreads. How did Paris, the capital of France and one of the most visited and populous cities in Europe, nearly survive the plague that ravaged much of the continent?
Lemonade is considered to be the first soft drink in the world to appear. It has been circulating in Egypt since prehistoric times and then slowly spread around the world, adding a lot of joy to the summer time. The citric acid contained in lemonade helps prevent bacteria from growing in drinking water, which means that lemonade drinkers have a higher survival rate. In the early 21st century, it was popular to add lemon slices to drinking hot water to promote digestion, "detoxify" and help maintain the body's weak alkalinity – but I think that in those months of 1668, lemons brought much greater benefits. That summer, lemonade spared thousands of Parisians without falling victim to the last plague in Europe, as the inhabitants of London, Vienna and Milan did.
Since the late 1650s, Italians and visiting visitors alike have been able to buy a wide variety of soft drinks, alcoholic beverages and mixed drinks in cafes or street vendors. These drinks include: brandy and a variety of neutral spirits soaked in cinnamon, cumin, angelica, raspberry, amber, musk, apricot and gooseberry; spiced wines, such as Louis XIV's favorite hippocras; non-alcoholic beverages such as almond rose flavor, almond syrup with tonic water; and of course lemonade, and a similar but more fleshy drink Sedley syrup (a mixture of lemon juice, lemon pulp, lemon peel, sugar and water). Due to the high cost and limited range of land suitable for cultivation, the promotion of lemonade has been hindered. However, when people cultivated more hardy and juicy lemon varieties, and the trade routes were smooth, the price of lemonade fell and was soon widely accepted. Because lemonade was simple to make and tasted fresh and delicious, soon every Roman wanted to take a sip on a hot summer day, and vendors began to carry cans of lemonade and sell them in the streets of the city.
Visitors to Paris to Italy — such as Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-1661), who succeeded the diabolical Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) as Chancellor of King Louis XIV of France — may have left Italy wondering why there were no merchants carrying this fresh drink in their own beautiful city. At that time, lemonade was already being drunk in Paris: it appeared in the seminal cookbook Chef François by François Pierre de La Valère. It was a very popular and influential cookbook that was translated into English two years after its publication and continued to be published for more than a century. The Perfect Jam Maker (1667, often considered the work of La Valenne) also features a recipe for the use of lemon and orange peels. Shortly before Cardinal Mazarin's death—delighted to find a new name for his taxation—brought lemonade merchants to Paris. Mazarin may have been a megalomaniac, but even he didn't expect Lemonade to save so many lives in just a few years.
It is often believed that the Black Death, which spread in Europe, was transmitted by flea bites. Now, many believe that fleas infected with Yersinia pestis live on gerbils that happen to board ships from the Far East. When these gerbils arrived in Europe, the fleas they carried spread to the ubiquitous European rat population. Fleas carrying plague germs spread through rats to all corners of the city. When their rat hosts die of plague, they are transferred from rats to humans or domestic animals, and after the human host dies of illness, they return to other mice. So, rats can also blame humans for transmitting fleas back to the rat herd, and as far as we know, this is indeed the case. The key to this mode of transmission is that urban rats are very closely related to human life – wherever there is organic garbage made by humans, rats will run to wherever they go. Although the devastation caused by the Black Death was enormous, it was surprising that it was such a fragile chain of transmission that caused the spread of infectious diseases throughout the city. Only when every element of this chain of transmission —fleas, rats, humans—is perfectly established can the plague germ cause an epidemic, or else it will die. This is the reason why, fortunately, the plague occurs every few hundred years, rather than in Europe, and explains why Paris was able to defeat the plague in 1668.
The Parisian fervor for Italian-style drinks was at its peak in the late 1660s and early 1670s – so much so that in 1676 Louis XIV reached an agreement with lemonade traders to combine them with French winemakers, mustard millers, and vinegar makers who had been squeezed by the French monarchy since 1394 to form the "Court Guard of Vinegar Merchants, Mustard Merchants, Seasoners, Brandy and Liquor Distillers". Although the name is still debatable, it is actually the first company in the world. They didn't know how ingenious the alliance was, because vinegar had been the most effective insect repellent for hundreds of years.
In the 17th century, people began to understand the mechanism by which plague spreads from person to person. Although it took centuries to discover the role of pests, a variety of preventive measures were taken to prevent infected populations from transmitting the plague to others. Doctors are clearly more concerned about their own health than they are about their patients, wearing black robes and long beak masks stuffed with or soaked in vinegar and herbs to fight airborne pathogens. A group of thieves used a blend of blends later known as "four thieves vinegar" to break into one empty house after another to steal. This blend contains herbs, garlic and vinegar and can prevent inhalation of harmful "miasmas" by inhaling, spraying or applying around the mouth and nose. In fact, it was indeed a broad-spectrum insect repellent recipe that was both effective and convenient, and until the 20th century, cookbooks and medical books were imitating it. If the "four thieves vinegar" had been widely sprayed, perhaps other cities would have been as immune to the plague as Paris.
However, these therapies do not target the real vector, the fleas, which is at the heart of the problem, not rats or toxic gases. Although the use of four thieves vinegar and the wearing of specialized medical masks do help to avoid human-to-human transmission due to close contact with fungal saliva or infected fleas, they have little effect on solving the deeper problems. Yes, I think lemons were the real reasons that stopped the spread of the plague in Paris in the summer of 1668.
For a time, the lemonade epidemic quickly became popular in Paris, so when Paris was under the threat of plague, the lemonade business may still be in the hands of street vendors. Lemonade is not just popular, it's even ubiquitous. As long as it is profitable, lemonade merchants will carry lemonade to every corner of the city. The limonene contained in lemons (as well as other citrus fruits) is a natural insecticide and repellent. The best working part of lemon is the peel rich in limonene. In fact, centuries after the discovery of chemical repellents, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency listed 15 pesticides, including common insect repellent sprays and pet fleas and tick control products, the main active ingredient of which is lemon olein. The French discarded the lemon peel and crushed pomace left over from the lemonade at the site that best hindered the generation of the flea-rat-human-rat chain: the garbage dump. In this way, although unintentionally, the whole city is actually covered with lemonade: lemonade merchants go to the richer areas to sell lemonade, and the peeled lemon and crushed pomace provide care for the poor areas. Not only did the large amount of lemons not bother the rats in any way, but on the contrary, the rats as omnivores were probably happy to try this fresh taste. In this way, although accidental, the fleas infected with Y. pestis were indeed killed.
Many other newly introduced beverages also contain insect repellent ingredients, such as star anise in star anise water, juniper in gin, coriander in coriander water, fennel in fennel, and so on. Indeed, many of the most commonly used herbs in imported beverages are themselves ingredients in Four Thieves Vinegar. Fleas carrying plague bacillus had little shelter in Paris in 1668. Fleas can't survive in ordinary dumps or sewers where rats often haunt because the places are covered with lemon olein and other insect repellents. Millions of dehydrated fleas have died in the streets, and at this moment, they must have missed the gerbils very much, while the rats and humans rejoiced in their good fortune.
In the years that followed, people from all walks of life sought credit for saving Paris from the brunt of the Black Death. Gabriel Nicolas de la René, who was appointed first Inspector General of Police of Paris in 1667, rose to fame for employing enlightened law enforcement to maintain stability and prevent further increases in the plague. Ministers, such as Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who pushed for trade restrictions and demanded that goods be thoroughly dried before entering Paris, and Jacques Berlin, the six guilds and magistrates, applauded their own foresight. Watching them do this, royal advisers hired someone to express their support. Louis XIV (1638-1715) seized several towns in Belgium, occupied by Spain, as a sign of celebration. One day, some Parisian will wake up and erect a bronze statue of a lemonade merchant, staring fearlessly ahead with his eyes, throwing used lemons over people's shoulders and into the garbage heap. Maybe the bronze statue will also be engraved with this line: Sorry, mice, we blame you.
This article is an excerpt from the book "How to Properly Read a Medieval Cookbook", which is published with the permission of the publisher, and the pictures in the article are also from this book.