[Sca-cooks] (no subject)

[David Friedman]

>I believe the receipe that we used came from
>one of the Florilegium articles on period gingerbread that is
>in one of the files concerning cooking with children.  It used
>red food coloring and bay leaves for decoration, which
>would be a nice Yuletide effect.

The "red food coloring" in the original (14th and 15th c. versions) 
is saunders--ground sandalwood root. I suspect that's less red than 
what you are thinking of.

The "bay leaves" are a misreading of, or substitute for, "box leaves" 
in the 15th c. original. I have my doubts about the box leaves, since 
I've encountered them nowhere else in the corpus and the 14th c. 
original has you putting the gingerbread in a box ("boyse" which 
seems from the OED to mean box, and so could easily have become "box" 
in a different copy).
-- 
David/Cariadoc
www.daviddfriedman.com