Last night, we were telling some late night house-callers about an all purple meal we had prepared Friday Night. It was baked purple potatoes (sliced thin in oil with lemon-thyme & purple garlic-onions, delicious), & buckwheat pasta in a white-wine/butter sauce with purple cauliflower, purple carrots, purple garlic-onions, portabella mushrooms, purple olives & capers. The result was a symphony of flavors, but only one color! This was a test-run & idea gathering mission for a whole purple meal, with aubergines & lavender things & beets tied up in strings. Our guests last night suggested either the cuisines of states that are half-red-state & half-blue-states. (Missouri cuisine? Florida cuisine?) Or cuisines from countries with purple flags.
Which leads us to the mystery. If you scan thru the flags of the world, none of them have purple in them! Why not? Internet searches to find purple flags found some alternate flags - like the Purple Flag of Chuvasia - & some sports flags - like the Sacramento Kings. "Purple Flag" is also slang for a person of gay persuasions, apparently. Still, why wouldn't any country anywhere have purple in it's flag? It's the royal color, the color of Christ on Easter, & a pretty strong hue all around. Luckily, there's a Wikipedia page with lists of flags by color - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flags_by_color - very useful for just such situations. I'll post some of the purple flags here:
This is from the Balearic Islands, an autonomous region of Spain off of the Iberian Peninsula. It may win for general classy color combination, & their groovy castle.
This one is also from Spain, from the port city of Málalga.
And this one was from the Spanish Second Republic. I suppose that could explain the color scheme of the Balearic Islands.
Other flags with purple in them were: 1) Montreal Flag has a Scottish thistle as one of its four flowers; 2) Gay Pride flag has a purple stripe; 3) Dominican Flag has a purple parrot in the center. Did you know the Gay Pride Flag employs the golden ratio?
I suppose, as far as cuisine, we could lean towards 1930's Tapas.
Any additional information on Purple Flags would be EXTREMELY HELPFUL. Or, if anyone knows why there is a dearth of them. It does seem a terrible loss. Or suggestions about purple foods or purple cuisine.
PURPLE FLAGS: THE SEQUEL
If you enjoyed this essay on purple flags, then, for no particular reason, I have reason to believe you will also enjoy the album "Stuck Home Syndrome" by Friends Around the Campfire. It's well worth the $5.99!
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7 comments:
Louisville, Kentucky's flag http://www.brandlouisville.com/images/LouFlag-web1.gif
1. Purple dye is historically rare. It was expensive because of how many mollusks you had to squeeze to get it.
2. I like to mash dried lavender flowers in with potatoes and leave them overnight. You can add beet juice to this for a RED/PINK meal. 3. The sky is technically purple.
Hmmm...
But surely purple was cheaper by the era of Nationalism?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple#Tyrian_purple:_Classical_antiquity
Check it out, listed in that same purple article, The Flag of Tokyo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Flag_of_Tokyo.svg
It's like an anime arse a-winkin' at me. Hard to think of any offensive cause with a purple flag, so I'm FER it!
http://panchimalco.ca/trivia/
Dominica, Spain and Venezuela have purple on their flags, but only a little. On the flags of El Salvador and Nicaragua, purple appears in the rainbow at the discretion of the artist.
You said it yourself. Purple was the color of royalty. The reason for that is expensive it was to produce. You want to have a flag that common people can own and that can be mass produced for your military. A purple flag would be too expensive.
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