SC - OT - recipe from Murrell

[Christina Nevin]

>> haue them greene and white, then temper sap-green with gum Arabick water
on the top of your pensill, <snip> If you will haue them siluer, then strike
them downe with shell-siluer, the like may be done with shell-gold.  if
blew, then Azur being first steept in vinegar, for else it is verie
dangerous, the vinegar killeth the strength of the blew:
If you would haue them red, then vse "Rosa-paris" (italics in the original)
on the top of your pensil: when these buttons be readie and drie, you may
set them vpon a card of Sugar plate, and fasten them with Gum-dragon steept
in damaske Rose-water and the owne paste tempered verie soft, serue it in on
plates of glasse, or keep it as long as you will.<<

Shell silver is the same as shell gold (apart from the obvious). They are
called 'shell' because that is what they were stored and sold in - mussel or
similar shells. Shell gold is basically gold ground into dust in a mortar,
then mixed with a binder such as gum arabic, and dried in the shell. It's
then added to a liquid binder when you want to use it. It's a very
metal-intensive paint, very expensive and usually used for calligraphy,
highlights and similar decorative touches. If you are thinking of doing
edible plate sugar with gold decoration, gold leaf uses a lot less metal and
is therefore more economic. 
Azure (Azurite - natural copper carbonate) would be poisonous to consume -
vinegar or no vinegar! 
Painters usually used any plant they could get their hands on with stable
sap to get sapgreen, so toxicity would vary. I'm unsure which pigment/color
they mean by 'Rosa-paris'.
By Gum-dragon I would say they mean Dragonsblood, which is  today and has
been since ancient times, an East Indian shrub known as Dracoena draco, and
the pigment is the dried resin sap of the plant. It is mentioned by Pliny
and various other classical and medieval authors (mainly for the amusingly
silly story that it was the gore from a battle between a dragon and an
elephant!). This was mainly used to colour gilding red (as they preferred
red-gold) and help other metals imitate gold. It was also occasionally used
in illumination, being an orange/brownish/red colour. It is non-poisonous
and also quite transparent.

Is this primarily a sweet recipe or were they actually meant to be used? 

Cordialmente
Lucretzia

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Lady Lucrezia-Isabella di Freccia   |  mka Tina Nevin
Thamesreach Shire, The Isles, Drachenwald | London, UK
thorngrove at geocities.com | http://www.geocities.com/~thorngrove  
"There is no doubt that great leaders prefer hard drinkers to good
versifiers" - Aretino, 1536 
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