Color in Medieval Food

from Food in Medieval Times by Melitta Weiss Adamson

Already in Roman times cooks cared about the color of the dishes they prepared. From the third-century cookbook De re coquinaria (The Art of Cooking) attributed to the first-century Roman gourmet Apicius, we learn that a boiled-down wine called defrutum was used to give the gravy of meat dishes a deeper color. Adding soda to green vegetables was known even then to brighten the natural color of vegetables. There are also examples of white and green sauces in the cookbook, and saffron already played a role as an additive to wine.

And yet, these Roman examples of enhancing and manipulating the color of food were nothing compared to the color craze that swept Europe in the wake of the Crusades to the Holy Land and other contacts by European Christians with the Arabs, notably in Sicily and southern Spain. Gold, red, white, and silver are the colors that abound in the few Arabic cookbooks we have from the Middle Ages. These colors were of enormous significance to Arab alchemists, whose goal was to turn the mercury extracted from cinnabar into gold with the help of sulfur.

To create white dishes medieval cooks did not usually color the ingredients but combined those that were by nature white, such as almonds, the white meat of poultry, sugar, rice, and ginger.

Dramatic effects could be achieved by preparing a dish in batches of different colors and arranging them on a platter with one half white and the other yellow, for instance, or creating the pattern of a checkerboard. Golden yellow, the result of using saffron and/or egg yolk, was the absolute favorite in Arab and European kitchens of the time. Saffron was added ground if an even coloring of the dish was desired, or sprinkled on top of a dish to cover the surface with golden dots or lines.

A cheaper way of gilding or “endoring” food was to cover it with egg yolk before the final cooking. Meatballs were covered this way in Arabic recipes that eventually made their way into European cookbooks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Green was a color that had long appealed to Europeans, as the Roman attempts at enhancing its appearance in vegetable dishes has shown. When yellow and green were mixed, it resulted in a bright green that was called gawdy grene in English, and vert gay in French. For darker greens, chard, spinach, parsley, mint, basil, and other herbs were used. To color a dish, either the pounded leaves or the juice extracted from them was added.

Much effort went into creating the various shades of red, from light pink to deep purple, with which cooks delighted the discerning diner. Sandalwood was frequently used and yielded an old-rose color, and draco, or dragon’s blood, was a plantbased dye that resulted in bright reds. The root of the plant alkanet, or dyer’s bugloss, also appears as a food dye in the medieval sources, as do rose petals, blood, and red grape juice.

Tournesoc or tournesol, an orchil lichen, gave medieval cooks the option of dying alkali-based dishes blue, which was the plant’s natural color, or red when combined with acids. Other ways of creating blues were adding columbine blossoms or blackberry pulp.

For the many shades of brown cooks utilized sandalwood, which gave them a pinkish brown, cinnamon for a camel’s hair color, blood for dark brown, or toasted bread or gingerbread, which, depending on the degree of toasting, would produce any shade from light brown to black. Cooked chicken liver, dark raisins, and prunes were other ingredients that could be used to color a dish black.

An especially dramatic effect was achieved by covering a dish or part of a dish, such as boar’s head, with gold or silver leaf that was ingested along with the meat and was regarded as having medicinal qualities.

Some types of dishes lent themselves especially well to coloring. Processed foods ranging from liquids to creams and pastes were habitually colored. Roast meat was usually accompanied by sauces that came in all the colors of the rainbow. Some of them were actually known by their color, such as green sauce, white sauce, or the famous camel- or cinnamon-colored sauce known as sauce cameline. Saffron gave many rice and almond dishes a radiant golden hue, and also added sparkle to jellies.

A medieval cook could show his mastery of the craft by creating multicolored jellies in the pattern of a checkerboard, for instance, or a round center in one color and an outer ring in a different color.

A dish of particular colors - from "And Thus You Have a Lordly Dish" (1553):

This is a dish of 5 roasted hens, all made a different color.

Item, a dish that in each part has a particular color is made thus. Roast hens on a spit and do not put them too close together. And when they are roasted make six colors. Make them white thus: take the whites of eggs, put a little flour in it. Make a thick paste. Item, make brown thus: take cherry electuary and mix it with eggs and flour to a brown paste. The yellow make thus: take the yolks of eggs, a little good flour, saffron, and three or four eggs. From that make a paste. Make green thus: take parsley. Put it through a cloth with eggs. Put a little flour with it and make a paste. Black: take flour and eggs; make a paste of them. Add crushed cloves which have soaked overnight in beaten eggs. Put enough in and it will be good black. When you have made these five colors, then baste each hen with its color, and be careful that you don't heat them too much. And when the coloring has dried, then take the hens from the fire and lay them next to other roasts on a platter.

Sabina Welser. "And Thus You Have a Lordly Dish: Fancy and Showpiece Cookery in an Augsberg Patrician Kitchen", (1553) from Medieval Food and Drink, Acta, vol. xxi. Binghamton University: State University of New York Press, 1995.