When Life Hands You Lemons,  Talk About History!
Presented by
Toby Sonneman
Author Lemon: A Global History

“The ordinary lemon is extraordinary.”–Toby Sonneman

Lemon: A Global History tells the story of the remarkable adventure of the lemon, starting with its fragrant and mysterious ancestor, the citron, adored by the Greeks and Romans for its fine perfume and sacred to many of the world’s great religions. The lemon travelled with Arabs along ancient trade routes, came of age in Sicily and Italy, and sailed to the New World with Columbus. It was an exotic luxury in seventeenth-century Europe and later went on to save the lives of thousands of sailors in the British Royal Navy after being recognized as a cure for scurvy. The last century saw the lemon’s rise to commercial success in a California citrus empire and the discovery of the Meyer lemon by the eccentric plant explorer Frank Meyer.

We’ll also take a look at Chicago connections: a living lemon orchard at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the ongoing summer tradition of icy lemonade at Mario’s Italian Lemonade in Chicago’s Little Italy.

Speaker bio:
Toby Sonneman is also the author of Fruit Fields in My Blood: Okie Migrants in the West and Shared Sorrows: A Gypsy Family Remembers the Holocaust. She is a native of Chicago and lives in the Pacific Northwest, with frequent travels to the lemon growing areas of Italy and Southern California.
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http://tobykitchen.wordpress.com/
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Saturday, August 17, 2013
10 a.m. to Noon
At
Kendall College, School of Culinary Arts
900 N. North Branch Street, Chicago
(Located just north of W. Chicago Ave. at N. Halsted St.)
Free Parking

Cost of the lecture program  is $5, $3 for students and no charge for CHC members and Kendall students and faculty.
To reserve, please e-mail your reservation to: Culinary.Historians@gmail.com.