Four thieves vinegar

The following vinegar recipe hung in the Museum of Paris in 1937, and is said to have been an original copy of the recipe posted on the walls of Marseille during an episode of the plague: Take three pints of strong white wine vinegar, add a handful of each of wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram and sage, fifty cloves, two ounces of campanula roots, two ounces of angelica, rosemary and horehound and three large measures of camphor.

Wormwood has properties similar to cedar as an insect repellent, as do aromatics such as sage, cloves, camphor, rosemary, and campanula.

Scientists have found wormwood, meadowsweet, wild marjoram, sage, cloves, campanula, angelica, rosemary, horehound and camphor to have antimicrobial properties.

Another version says that the thieves had already been caught before the outbreak and their sentence had been to bury dead plague victims; to survive this punishment, they created the vinegar.

[citation needed] Another humorous snippet in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, reads:[11] A report of the plague in 1760 having been circulated,[12] Messrs. Chandler and Smith, apothecaries,[13] in Cheapside, had taken in a third partner, (Mr. Newsom,) and while the report prevailed, these gentlemen availed themselves of the popular opinion, and put a written notice in their windows of "Four Thieves' Vinegar sold here."