[Sca-cooks] Lemons in Middle English

[James Prescott]

Lemons:

1604 is later than the 1100 to 1500 first mentioned, but provides
a date when lemons were certainly in use in cooking in Belgium
(which is as far north as southern England):

"Ouverture de Cuisine", published in what is today Belgium in 1604,
and containing recipes current during the second half of the 1500s,
uses "citron" and "limon".  Translating the latter poses some
problems, and my reading is not definitive.  The word "limon"
usually occurs as "limon sale" [w. acute accent].  "Sale" means
salted (or in some contexts sour).  Rey et al define "limon" as
a sour lemon with a thin skin (with earliest citation in French
from about 1314).

In Ouverture 9 recipes call for fresh lemon, 3 recipes call for
fresh sour lemon, and 17 recipes call for salted sour lemon.

It might be relevant that in 1604 Belgium was occupied by the
Spanish, who as we have seen used lemons from an early date.


I haven't looked extremely hard, but that's the earliest use
from northern Europe that I've found in any of my sources.



Scurvy was also mentioned:

The English East India Company is mentioned as gathering oranges
and lemons from Madagascar in 1601 which they turned into juice
specifically for use against scurvy.


Thorvald