But at some point between 1799 and 1870, someone switched out lemons for limes, which contain a lot less vitamin C.
I recall reading, but can’t find a source now, that this happen due to early confusion about citrus fruit among the British, who called all varieties of lemons and limes “limes” and thus made this mistake repeatedly not only by mixing up lemons and limes, but also mixing up lime varieties with more and less vitamin C because they didn’t have words to specify the difference. It was only in the 20th Century that the problem got sorted out when British grocers started to regularly stock multiple lime varieties thanks to improvements in shipping.
(Very happy to be corrected or provided a source. This feels like the kind of thing that could be true, but also could be apocryphal and made up by an author, retold by others, and now there’s a bunch of sources that just claim it’s true.)
I recall reading, but can’t find a source now, that this happen due to early confusion about citrus fruit among the British, who called all varieties of lemons and limes “limes” and thus made this mistake repeatedly not only by mixing up lemons and limes, but also mixing up lime varieties with more and less vitamin C because they didn’t have words to specify the difference. It was only in the 20th Century that the problem got sorted out when British grocers started to regularly stock multiple lime varieties thanks to improvements in shipping.
(Very happy to be corrected or provided a source. This feels like the kind of thing that could be true, but also could be apocryphal and made up by an author, retold by others, and now there’s a bunch of sources that just claim it’s true.)
SMTM has a follow-up post that goes into how confusing citrus classifications are.
In particular:
The British called all citrus “lime” or “lemon” interchangeably (like you say).
Lemons can be green and limes can be yellow, so you can’t clearly distinguish based on color.
We still use the word “lime” for a bunch of different kinds of citrus, so we’re not that much better.