[Sca-cooks] White Anise, was Adventures in redaction...LONG

[Helen Highwater]

I wrote:
>  Or perhaps "white anise" is fennel seed... but i could be wrong...

And Jadwiga Zajaczkowa responded:
>  Ooh. That's an important thought to follow up. What would lead you to that
>  concept? (I'm not arguing, I'm just trying to figure out whether this is a
>  construct I should warn my students about!)

Argue away. I construe "argue" and "argument" to be used here in the
philosophical sense, and not to be the screaming, raised voices kind.

Anyway, i have absolutely no good Medieval/Renaissance reason.

I think my conjecture comes from reading the names of various spice
seeds in foreign languages. There are rather a lot of seeds with the
same or very similar shapes (anise, caraway, cumin, dill, fennel,
etc.) although rather different scents and flavors. Sometimes in some
South and Southeast Asian languages the names are virtually the same,
with changing modifiers, e.g., "sweet cumin" in Bahasa Indonesia, and
"white cumin" in Malay for fennel.

So, it's only my synapses firing, no real info. Just a thought, not
any conclusive evidence.

If sugar-coated anise-seed comfits are commonly referred to as "white
anise" in the Medieval/Renaissance corpus, i defer to these actual
historical references.

Anahita