Medieval Manuscript Garlic references 2017

The juice of hard necked garlic, Allium sativum, grown across the world in northern latitudes, may be used for all sorts of culinary applications as well as a gilding binder and more.

 Allium sativum scapes growing 2017

 

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Garlic juice was also even used as a stand alone preparation for painting metal or glass (Eastlake 533).

Mary Merrifield talks about using garlic fumes as an insecticide, drying oil, a mordant alone and mordant with a red clay, Armenian bole, and some lead white (ceruse) and lead red (Merrifield cxxv, ccxxxvii, 94, 748, juice, mordant of 622, 624). Note that 748 is in the Volpato MS which is slightly post SCA 'period', dated to the seventeenth century.

Cennino Cennini mentions it as a mordant too (Broecke 198-9, 217) and specifies that you should "not take green or young garlic; take it when it is at a middle stage." (198) and that it should be only used where it can protected from water and moisture in general.

Theophilus mentions it in On Divers Arts as a curative for 'various sickness' (112) caused by mercury vapor inhalation... no thanks!

In a publication by Getty called the Simone Manuscript "MS 1793", dated 1422,

Wallert 1996

Then there's a reference in an earlier source that uses it in a different way:

Mappae Clavicula (Smith, Cyril Stanley and Hawthorne, Daniel G. 58)

And it's note...

Mappae Clavicula (Smith, Cyril Stanley and Hawthorne, Daniel G. 58)

Garlic! You just thought it made your breath stinky but cured your cold; now you know you can use it with gold!