[Sca-cooks] Lemonade in medieval Egypt

lilinah at earthlink.net lilinah at earthlink.net
Wed Jun 28 16:35:29 PDT 2006


Johnna Holloway wrote:
>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?

I actually downloaded this page a year or two ago. There is a nice 
array of non-alcoholic drinks in the Near and Middle East... my 
problem was finding non-alcoholic drink recipes for the 16th century.

I've got the full set by Goitein, but i've never taken a look at the 
footnote. Gotta do it now :-)

I made lemon syrup for the dayboard just as the Andalusi cookbook 
says - equal parts lemon juice and sugar. I also had peach syrup and 
left over from Beltane was some Seville orange syrup, which was all 
drunk up. I really need to stock up on Seville oranges when they're 
in season and freeze juice.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita



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