SC - Summertime Cerulean Blue Sauce

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

>The comment about black currants is purely speculative and whimsical.  If
>raisins of Corinth (genus Vitis) were currants, what did they call currants
>(genus Ribes)?


Nothing much, it seems. To quote John Ayto:

"... but when various fruit bushes of the genus Ribes were introduced into
Britain from northern Europe in the late sixteenth century, the popular
misconception arose that the familiar dried currants were made from their
fruits, and so the name was transferred, and today we have blackcurrants,
redcurrants, etc. ... One of the first references to them in English is made
in Niewe Herball or Historie of Plantes (1578) translated by Henry Lyte who,
realizing that they are members of the gooseberry family, calls them
"beyond-seas gooseberries". But he could not forbear to mention that the
name "currant" was already catching on - "bastard currants", was his term.
At first purists, linguistic and horticultural, tried to discourage the
usage - John Gerard disapproved of it, and John Parkinson wrote, in A Garden
of Flowers (1629): "Those berries ... usually called red currans are not
those currans ... that are sold at the Grocers" - but by the late
seventeenth century it had become firmly established."

Nanna

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