As my daughter Elena and our research team (Xabi Gutiérrez and Igor Zalakaín) explained in detail at Madrid Fusion 2009, colour can be both the star and the most innovative element of a dish.
Creative cooks use colour schemes in their dishes to portray which colours inspire, for example, the freshness and naturalness of green, the warmth of orange or the vitality and strength of red.
One example of colour as an extra flavour is the recipe Bonito Parterre. A parterre is a garden with flowerbeds or bordered plants, generally in a symmetric design. And so it is in this dish: with smoked bonito in plants or soil. The triangles are the green of leeks, cooked for barely two minutes to retain their colour, then worked to resemble a thin sheet of paper, simulating the parterre grass. And the vivid reddish part (the so-called flowers) in this hypothetical garden are made using cochineal, Dactylopius coccus, also known as carmine cochineal. A bug converted to a flower.
Cochineal is an insect, originally from Mexico, which feeds on the sap of the cactus or prickly pear and, as a defence, the female produces a red liquid, which is used as a dye.
There is evidence that this pigment was used in Peru and Mexico, prior to the Spanish conquest. In Aztec Mexico it was used to colour textiles. According to Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who aptly describes it in his General History of Things of New Spain (a work of 1569, which remained unpublished until 1829), it was called nocheztli, which means ‘prickly pear blood because in some genres of prickly pear, worms called mealybugs are bred, attached to the leaves, and these worms have very red blood’. The first shipment of cochineal to Europe occurred in 1523, and for several centuries cochineal was, along with gold and silver, one of the most valuable materials exported from America. But the truth is that until recently it was used exclusively as a textile dye.
