[Sca-cooks] Lemons in Middle English

[Terry Decker]

William, you are the one who set the "Middle English" limit.  Middle English 
is usually meant to be the English in use between 1100 and 1500, which 
covers the Crusades through the Renaissance.  IIRC, you are also the one who 
brought the Crusaders into the debate, so trying to reset the debate to a 
1300-1400's limit is a little problematic.  But let us consider available 
sources (with the understanding that I did a quick survey and may be wrong).

The Viander (1250-1395, depending on the particular manuscripts) does not 
mention lemons.  Neither does Menagier (1393) or Du fait de cuisine (1420). 
The Liber cure cocurum (1st half of the 14th Century) doesn't mention them 
and I don't remember the Two Fifteenth Century Cookbooks (1430 and 1450) 
having lemons in any recipe.  The Anonimo Veneziana (sic?) (14th Century) 
does mention them as do Martino (15th) and De Nola (16th).  Keukenboek (16th 
century Dutch) makes no mention of lemons.  In England, A.W. A Book of 
Cookrye (1591) has recipes as does A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen 
(1608, which is IIRC a screw citation for Plat).

Curiously, Markham's The English Housewife makes no mention of lemons that I 
can find.

What these cookbooks suggest is that lemons were not used much in Northern 
Europe before the 16th Century and that they were introduced into 
Mediterranean cooking in the 14th Century and popularized in the 15th and 
16th Centuries.  The cooks who created these recipes would certainly have 
used lemons if they were available.  The fact that they are not mentioned 
leads one to believe that lemons were not available.

We know that people in Europe had knowledge of lemons no later than the 1st 
Crusade (probably earlier).  We know that someone in England had first hand 
experience with lemon juice by 1400 (OED).  What we haven't determined is 
where that knowledge was gained.  A refreshing lemon drink experienced in 
Turkey does not translate to lemons in England.  Knowledge and experience 
are different things.

While I did provide you with a couple of references, one to lemons being 
marketed in Paris in the 13th Century and the other to lemons being grown 
for export in the Azores in 1494, let me remind you of the caveat; I have 
not seen the sources for those statements.  I offered them not as facts, but 
as points to research.  Without some supporting documentation, they are 
merely interesting anomalies.  Knowing that a market existed doesn't provide 
any information about the scope of that market.  For example, the first 
recorded sale of bananas (they weren't the first, but that is another story) 
in England was in 1633.  From that fact, how big was the market?  It takes a 
little bit of digging, the market was one bunch.  Other bananas may have 
been sold there at other times, but a serious commercial trade in bananas 
didn't exist until the 19th Century.  What is the scope of the lemon market 
in England?

Harrison's Description of Elizabethan England 1577 doesn't mention those 
great rolling lemon orchards, so I guess he was blind.  Lemon trees grow 
best in a temperature range of 50-95 degrees F.  They like to be well 
watered but prefer a dry climate.  That's fairly standard textbook 
agriculture, but just to give you a reference, 
http://www.easyfruit.co.uk/lemons/ .  This means that growing an orchard of 
lemons in England is a losing proposition.  Which in turn means that any 
commercial lemon growing is limited to green houses, suggesting that lemons 
were not grown for sale in England, but imported.  No one disputes that 
lemons can be grown in a green house (as the diary at the website above 
proves) just that we have no evidence that it was done in England prior to 
the modern period.

A theory fits all known facts.  Your speculation does not fit the facts we 
know nor does it adequately answer the questions we have, so we discount its 
accuracy.  Your speculation may have merit, but it is not up to us to 
disprove your speculation, it is incumbent on you to prove your case.  That 
means providing the documentation.  And you can't complain you're just a 
layman and don't have access, I don't have any academic credentials or 
access to a lot of documents either other than through readily available 
sources.

None of us is opposed to you being right, we just want to see the evidence, 
because we haven't found it.

Bear.