SC - Documentation

[Stephen Bloch]

Tibor wrote:
> Yellow?  Saffron.  Green?  That's not too hard: crush damp parsley in a
> mortar or with a food processor, and the green juice works.  (And, its
> period!)  Black would be hard: I'd consider walnuts, purple would be blue
> berries.  Blue?  As George Carlin said "There is no blue food". I dunno.

I'll second the saffron for yellow and parsley juice for green; both of
those appear often in medieval English cookbooks.  I think the most
common black I've seen in medieval cookbooks is blood, but you might not
want to use that in your marzipan :-)  For purple, the word is ALKANET.
And for blue, TURNSOLE.  I believe both of these last two are dried
flowers.  I bought a bag of alkanet at Pennsic a few years ago, put the
plastic bag (still sealed) into my spice drawer, and a month later the
shelf-paper lining the drawer was a permanent purple where the bag had 
been.  As for turnsole, it's not clear what modern Latin name
corresponds to it.  Is it the same thing as heliotrope (the literal
translation from French into Greek), or are they just two different
flowers that follow the sun?  We bought a bag of very blue dried flowers
at a Middle Eastern grocery, suspecting they might be turnsole, but we
haven't really experimented with them yet.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University
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