[Sca-cooks] blue food coloring

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

We've discussed that sky-blue/cerulean sauce recipe. I don't think
anyone made it look like our modern idea of sky blue, but it does
make a violet.

Color words are rather hard to pin down to actual colors, and a word
can refer to one color in one time period and a rather different
color in another - or one thing in one country and something else in
another.

Some languages have very few color words. That doesn't mean the
people don't see the colors, but they have to express them
differently than we do, for example.

For example, IIRC, Chinese has one word for blue and green, but there
are clear distinctions between them and their various hues. One can
use modifiers, after all. We do - sky blue, navy blue, grass green,
forest green.

Or take purple for example. Americans tend to mean a rather blue
violet by this term. But Medieval purple is rather more red. Now, i'm
not saying Medieval purple is red. I'm saying it's a redder color
than modern American "purple". So when we read about "purple" as a
color in heraldry, illumination, garments, etc. we conceive of a
rather different color than it actually was, based on surviving items
that are identified "in period" as being "purple". Also, i'm also not
saying there was one single "purple", but the range of colors was
different than our modern mental range.

As another example, there was no specific word for the color "orange"
during most of "SCA period". Obviously there were things in the world
that were what we now call "orange". Generally these were considered
some value of red.

So, our expectations of a color may be very different than a Medieval
or Renaissance cook's (or illuminators or dyers or...).

As for turnsole - there's much debate in the scholarly community over
what this was. It was a plant color and used in illumination. But the
actual botanical source is not certain. It was not the modern
heliotrope.

Anahita