The Vinegar of the Four Thieves
Within the average French supermarket, a few aisles are particularly perilous for transplanted expats. Accustomed to quickly choosing from a limited choice of, say, mustard or table salt or fresh yogurt, the seemingly endless varieties enjoyed by the French can prove confounding. If you come across a slack-jawed, vacant-eyed person in the cheese section at Carrefour, they are probably just trying to decide between fifty types of Camembert.
The vinegar aisle is another maze of new delights. Not here the spare display of red wine, white wine, balsamic, and malt varieties. In France, vinegar—which after all comes from vinaigre, or “sour wine”—is a much more interesting and diversified product. You will find it infused with herbs, fruits, or nuts, or given an extra kick by garlic or shallots. Balsamic vinegar is available in its original version or velours, a softer and thicker version. White balsamic vinegar is a very popular alternative. And vinegar also reigns in the cleaning aisles, which is unsurprising when you discover that most French people consider white vinegar an essential product for the home, regularly chucking it into washing machines, dishwashers, and kettles. If you’re ever faced with a really unpleasant and stubborn mess in your house, a good first step is to throw some white vinegar on it (however disconcerting this may make your next encounter with salad dressing).
Yet one popular variety of vinegar, known as “four thieves vinegar,” is not usually found in the standard French supermarket. It is a folk remedy, made at home, with a rather macabre legend attached to it—one that helps illuminate one of the most disastrous eras in French history.
The year 1347 was definitely a dark one for France. After losing the town of Calais to the English in the summer, the fall brought a much more devastating invasion in the south of France. At that time people called it la peste (the pestilence). Today, it is known to us as the Black Death, a near-apocalyptic outbreak of bubonic plague. By the time it ebbed five years later, a third of the population of France lay dead.1
Historians and epidemiologists continue to debate nearly every facet of the Black Death, but today it is generally thought that the plague originated in China and encroached upon Europe via the Caspian Sea region. It might have stalled there were it not for the great transformations shaping this period of early modernity in Europe. The development of markets, trading networks, currencies—all the precursors of modern capitalism—was accompanied by the building of large commercial fleets and merchant companies. With rapid population growth, the countryside was becoming more settled, and trade routes extended farther and farther into the interior. All these factors made epidemics more common, as people had higher levels of human contact, across longer distances, and as yet no understanding of bacteria and disease. Plagues were thought to be an act of divine punishment.
In actuality, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, invaded the human population in the fourteenth century via the fleas living on infected rats. As trade ships plied the waters around Europe in ever greater numbers, they were the perfect dispersal tool for plague, a deadly cargo of infected rats stowed unknowingly within their hulls.
It is thought that the disease traveled westward from the Caspian region in late 1346, after Mongol forces laid siege to a Genoese trading station at Kaffa, in Crimea. Decimated by plague, their siege failing, the Mongol attackers were said to have catapulted some of their dead into the town. When the merchants finally fled Kaffa in May 1347, it appears they brought a most unfortunate passenger with them. That summer, plague laid waste to Constantinople, before beginning its spread through the major Mediterranean trading towns.
The Black Death arrived in France through the great port of Marseille, where more than fifty thousand people died within a few weeks.2 It spread north up the Rhône Valley to Lyon, and westward along the Mediterranean coast, ravaging the Languedoc. It followed the ancient trading routes up to Bordeaux, at that time one of the most important trade ports in Europe. From here, the plague spread easily to northern France, England, and beyond.
The plague scoured Europe with unprecedented savagery and rapidity. It tended to burn out within each locale in about a year, but in that short period of time, it might carry off a third or even half of the population. A healthy person could be infected and die within days. Contemporary descriptions of the symptoms are chilling: high fever, nausea, hallucinations, and hard swellings, or buboes, in the groin or armpit. Only a lucky few survived the disease. Its high mortality and evident agony terrified people so much that they often abandoned infected family members, even their own children. People died in such great numbers that they were tossed into mass graves. Social conventions withered under the sustained assault of death and despair: some people succumbed to all possible vices, approaching every day as if it were their last, while others embraced extreme levels of religious piety. A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants, for example, traveled from town to town whipping themselves, trying to atone for the sins of mankind.
While many assumed the plague was some sort of heavenly curse, some people looked for more earthly scapegoats. Across Europe, thousands of Jews were tortured and killed, accused of intentionally causing the plague by poisoning wells. In Strasbourg, for example, nearly a thousand Jews were burned to death on Saint Valentine’s Day 1349, before the plague had even arrived in the city. (The confiscation of their assets reveals the mercenary motives that also drove these pogroms.) Their deaths did not spare the city from pestilence, of course: more than sixteen thousand people subsequently died in Strasbourg.3
Over the next five years, the plague gradually enveloped much of Europe and Asia. Mortality rates varied considerably, but at least 30 percent, and perhaps even 50 percent, of the population of Europe died in this very short period of time. The plague reappeared five more times that century, albeit at somewhat less disastrous levels (the 1361 outbreak “only” killed 10 to 20 percent of the population). In part because of these and other epidemics, the population of Europe would not return to pre-1347 levels until the sixteenth century. Plague recurred with less and less frequency, but serious outbreaks continued to afflict Europe into the eighteenth century.
Over the years, the initial certitude that the plague was divinely inflicted began to yield to more secular (if still incorrect) theories, and these led people to adopt wide-ranging changes in personal behavior—including their diet. During the Black Death, the plague very obviously began in the coastal regions before moving inland, so many people believed some kind of contamination of the sea was to blame and stopped eating fish. Others noted that the plague followed the major trade routes, correctly identifying ships as an important mechanism in its spread, and began to shun spices and other imported foods. A host of folk remedies emerged as well, with people strapping live chickens or garlic around their buboes, or placing their last hopes in potions such as theriac (an ancient and expensive medicine containing snake flesh, opium, and dozens of spices, herbs, and plants).4 Only much later did more reliable public health measures begin to be put in place, such as quarantines. In the early 1500s, Nostradamus—then a French doctor, many years before he wrote his occult prophecies—employed a “rose pill,” a herbal lozenge made of rosehips, in successfully treating many plague victims, but it is likely his progressive insistence on hygiene was the actual key to his success.
During the Black Death, most doctors, not having any recourse to germ theory or other modern medical doctrine, regularly dispensed culinary advice instead. Their theories and practices were still heavily influenced by the works of classical Greek doctors, notably Hippocrates and Galen (whose advice for avoiding plague, Cito, longe, tarde (Leave quickly, go far away, come back slowly), could not really be improved upon even a thousand years later). The classical theory of disease began with the belief that the human body was composed of four elements (fire, air, earth, and water), four elementary qualities (hot, cold, moist, and dry), and four humors, or fluids (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm). An imbalance of humors left the body susceptible to disease, but balance could be restored by methods both benign (changes in diet) and unpleasant (leeching and purging). Thus, because a body that was mainly hot and moist had a higher risk of catching the plague, it was important to eat food that had cold and dry qualities, like roasted meat and bread.5 Some herbs and spices were advisable (although not those on the hot end of the scale), but most fruits should be avoided.
By far the ultimate cold and dry ingredient was vinegar, which was deployed in a variety of ways against the plague. It was added to sauces or sprinkled on main dishes, and it was a key ingredient in popular plague “cures.” People also washed their hands in vinegar and dribbled it around their homes. Breathing through a cloth dipped in vinegar was thought to offer protection against the miasma, or bad air, from which many contagious diseases were thought to originate.
Folk remedies such as these are fertile ground for legends, and here we come to the origins of four thieves vinegar in this early modern plague era. This vinegar is infused with a number of herbs, spices, and aromatics—everything from garlic and camphor to rosemary, lavender, and sage. Its name stems from its origin myth: during a plague outbreak in France, four thieves who were relieving the dead of their possessions were caught and brought before a judge, who at first sentenced them to the pyre. But he couldn’t help notice that the four thieves looked surprisingly healthy considering their close professional contact with the dead bodies of the infected, and he made a deal with them: if they would share their secret, they would be hanged instead of burned, a much less painful death. The thieves confessed their infused-vinegar recipe, claiming to have coated their bodies with it before going about their work, and insisted this was what kept them alive.
Vinegar was already seen as a healthful ingredient for many other afflictions, and for a long time in the Middle Ages apothecaries and vinegar makers were closely linked professions, sharing the same guild. People who use four thieves vinegar today, in our mostly plague-free times, swear that it will disinfect wounds, get rid of lice, and cure mouth ulcers. It is also said to help with headaches and breathing problems.
But for the most part, vinegars are mainly used today for salad dressings. The classic vinaigrette dressing consists of oil and vinegar, usually with added mustard and herbs. In England today, it is called French dressing, possibly thanks to the efforts of an eighteenth-century French exile named d’Albignac. Brillat-Savarin tells us that d’Albignac was dining one night at a London restaurant when he was asked by a neighboring table if he would be so kind as to dress their salads (the French at that time enjoying a sterling reputation for their salad dressing skills). He obliged, and the result was so delicious that he was asked to repeat his feat at a society dinner. Eventually, he became known as “the fashionable salad maker,” traveling from house to house with a servant carrying his mahogany suitcase full of ingredients, whipping up delightful salads for the upper classes. He amassed a considerable fortune, enabling him to finally return to France in comfort.6
Unfortunately, while vinegar may have saved d’Albignac from poverty, it did not save France from the plague. But it must be said that not all of the long-lasting consequences of the plague were negative. The drastic reduction in the labor force severely disrupted feudal arrangements: landowners had to start paying wages to those who were left to work their lands. In the cities, artisans and other workers could also demand higher wages and better working conditions. Increasingly, members of the Third Estate were able to buy land and property, their living standards rose, and new pathways of social mobility began to appear. When the upper classes tried to impose a return to previous arrangements, popular revolts ensured that the new conditions stayed in place. Thus, the Black Death is often seen as an important contributor to the erosion of feudalism in the early modern era.
The plague also undermined the strength of the Catholic Church in France, already facing much criticism due to perceived corruption during this period of the Avignon papacy. While many people clung fiercely to their faith when the plague initially hit, it quickly became evident that prayer and rectitude did not deter the implacable pestilence. Many clergy died, and religious rituals around death were abandoned in the face of such massive losses. Many people turned away from the Church, embracing mysticism and the occult, or more private forms of Christian worship, or even agnosticism. This weakening of the Church’s stranglehold on the population’s worldview was an important precursor to the Reformation and Renaissance eras yet to come.
And finally, the Black Death had a temporary impact on the eating habits of the French people. Initially, the collapse of agricultural production and trade meant high levels of food scarcity. But as the plague receded, leaving behind a smaller population that could demand higher wages, there was a certain amount of leveling in the eating habits of the upper and lower classes. Peasants could now afford to eat wheat bread and more meat, just like the nobles. But this more egalitarian way of eating did not last for very long. As we shall see, the upper classes rapidly set about finding new ways of differentiating themselves from the common people, and the dining table would once again become a notable front in the class struggle.