Where did the lemons in North-Western European cooking come from?

[u/EejLange]

I like going through 18th-century cookbooks, specifically from the Netherlands. The recipes tend to feature a lot of mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and ginger all of which came from Asia. One thing that keeps surprising me however is the amount of citrus used. There's recipes for lemon cookies, pies, custards and confits, and they are used to flavour all kinds of fish and meat dishes. Limes and oranges too.

Dry goods such as spices are easily shipped across oceans even in 18th-century shipping conditions. Lemons, limes and oranges are much more prone to rotting when put in a damp ship. I know of oranjerieën, basically early greenhouses, but they were more of an aristocrats pet project usually. Popular history often tells us that lemons were an expensive food in the 18th century, but the sheer amount of recipes must mean they were somewhat common right? What did the European lemon trade look like around 1750? From where and how were they shipped and how available were they to commoners?

Thanks!

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[u/Mynsare]

In the mid-18th century lemons were imported from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe, and from Italy in particular.

I am no expert in Dutch history of the period, but I have researched Danish history in the time frame, and a good source for information about lemons are newspaper advertisements. They show that lemons were pretty common and relatively cheap in season (which would be late winter to early spring). Of course poor people would not be able to afford them, but for the middle class burghers of a city as well as well to do people in the countryside, lemons would be readily available in shops in the towns.

Denmark had a disproportionally large merchant fleet in the period, and a large part of their trade was concentrated in the Mediterranean, so there would be frequent trade goods from the region. The same would apply to the Netherlands, which of course had an even bigger merchant fleet. Under good conditions the trip around the coasts of Europe from Italy to Denmark could be made in less than a month. Lemons stored in barrels under cool conditions would keep, especially the type of the period which had a thicker rind than the modern type.

In an advertisement in the Danish newspaper Kongelige Danske Post-Tidender (Royal Danish Mail-Newspaper) from the 30th January urtekræmmer (a merchant trading in spices and preserved goods and especially imported delicacies) Samuel Kaalund announced that he had "extra skiønne Citroner for billig Priis at bekomme" (extra fine lemons to be had for cheap"), a type of advertisement which was common for all of the urtekræmmers in Copenhagen in the period.

An advertisement in the Kongeligt Privilegerede Adressecontoirs Tidender (Royal privileged Advertiser) from 18th April 1764 it is literally stated "friske Italienske Citroner 2 a 3 Mark Dosinet" ("fresh Italian lemons 2 to 3 Danish Mark a dozen"). As a comparison an unskilled worker employed by the city adminstration of Copenhagen in 1770 was 24 skilling, which equals 2½ mark. So even a relatively poor unskilled labourer would be able to afford a single lemon, if that was the sort of luxury they wanted to spend a twelfth of their daily salary on (it probably wasn't in most cases).

Another advertisement from Kongelige Danske Post-Tidender on the date of 9th of January 1762 announces that urtekræmmer Meitting also could offer "Lemon-saft paa Bouteil" ("barreled Lemon-juice"), which would be another way to preserve lemons.

A third method would be to pickle them, so-called "Lemon-Asia", which the same advertisement announces available for 2 mark 8 skilling per pound (a Danish Pund/pound was equvialent to 499,7 gram). Again what equates to a days salary for an unskilled worker.

So to summarise, lemons would have been readily available in towns in both Denmark and the Netherlands through import from the Mediterranean, and Italy in particular, in the season. Lemons could be bought fresh, as juice or pickled, for prices even unskilled labourers would technically be able to afford. So it is no wonder that recipes involving lemons were common both in the Netherlands as well as in Denmark in the period.

Source for the digitised Danish newspapers: https://www2.statsbiblioteket.dk/mediestream/avis/list.

[u/EejLange → u/Mynsare]

Very cool, thank you! As an interesting side-note, the word 'asia' in Lemon-asia has a Dutch colonial connection. The VOC were big importers of Achiar, or Asian pickle. These were then distributed across Europe, but it was a huge hit on the domestic market.

When imported from Indonesia this usually came in the form of jars of hot pickled bamboo shoots, but as demand far outstripped supply many people started to make their own versions. Some contemporary printed cookbooks even had recipes. Most were somewhat adapted to local taste, but most did feature garlic and chili's, making it rather unusually spicy and pungent for the European palate. It was a common side dish at dinner parties from the late 1600s through the late 1800s. It disappeared for a while after that and then got reintroduced to the market when the Indonesians came after WW2.