Where does Lemonade come from?
Lemonade comes from Cairo. The oldest records of the drink are from medieval Egypt, where by the early 1100s merchants were selling and exporting bottles of lemon juice made with plenty of sugar, centuries before lemonade stands became a summer tradition in America.
Lemon juice and sugar in Cairo
Lemons came from farther east, but Egypt knew them by the 11th century: the Persian traveller Nasir-i-Khusraw mentions them in his account of the country under the Fatimid caliphs. Documents from the Cairo Geniza, the records of the city's medieval Jewish community, show that the trade in lemon juice was considerable by 1104. Bottles of qatarmizat, lemon juice made with lots of sugar, were drunk locally and exported. The food historian Clifford A. Wright calls this the earliest written evidence of lemonade.
From Egypt to the streets of Paris
In the 12th century Ibn Jumayʿ, a physician at the Egyptian court, wrote a treatise On Lemon, Its Drinking and Use, with recipes for lemon drinks. Lemonade followed sugar and the lemon itself into Europe, at first as a drink for the very rich and the very sick. By the 17th century Paris was full of wandering lemonade sellers who carried the drink in tanks strapped to their backs, and in 1676 a company of 'limonadiers' was selling it in the city.
Why people think of America
Lemonade feels American because America made it a symbol. Children's lemonade stands became an emblem of summer in the United States and Canada, and the alcohol-free drink suited the temperance movement. Lucy Webb Hayes, First Lady from 1877 to 1881, is remembered as 'Lemonade Lucy' because no alcohol was served at the White House in those years, though she was never called that in her lifetime. Soldiers and frontier travellers carried 'portable lemonade', a dry mix of sugar, lemon and citric acid.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Lemonade ↗ · web.archive.org ↗ · atlasobscura.com ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Lucy Webb Hayes ↗
