[Sca-cooks] Lemonade in medieval Egypt

Sydney Walker Freedman freedmas at stolaf.edu
Tue Jun 27 16:48:31 PDT 2006


This sounds a lot like the Syrup of Lemon from the thirteenth-century
anonymous Andalusian cookbook in Cariadoc's Miscellany.

> I came across another alternative version for
> the history of lemonade tonight.
>
> Clifford Wright has an article on his webpages
> titled "Some facts about Mediterranean food history.
> History of Lemonade."
> He writes
> "It appears that the all-American summer drink, lemonade, may have had
> its origin in medieval Egypt. Although the lemon originates farther to
> the east, and lemonade may very well have been invented in one of the
> eastern countries, the earliest written evidence of lemonade comes from
> Egypt. The first reference to the lemon in Egypt is in the chronicles of
> the Persian poet and traveler Nasir-i-Khusraw (1003-1061?), who left a
> valuable account of life in Egypt under the Fatamid caliph al-Mustansir
> (1035-1094). The trade in lemon juice was quite considerable by 1104. We
> know from documents in the Cairo Geniza--records of the medieval Jewish
> community in Cairo from the tenth through thirteenth centuries--that
> bottles of lemon juice, qatarmizat, were made with lots of sugar and
> consumed locally and exported.6"
> The footnotes given are
> 6. Watson 1983: 46, 169 n. 28; Sarton 1927: (1) 468; Goitein, S. D. A
> Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
> Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Berkeley: University of
> California Press, 1967 vol. I: Economic Foundations: 121; 428 n. 42.
>
> http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/lemonade.html
>
> Now what was that question about non-alcoholic medieval drinks?
>
> Johnnae llyn Lewis
>
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Pax Christi,
Sydney




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