In the high society of medieval Europe, color was symbolic. Through color, court costumes, coats of arms, and stained glass in churches conveyed information about social status and revealed spiritual and moral connotations. Colorful dishes presented in cookbooks dated from the end of the thirteenth century indicate that color was also an important element of feasts, although, in ancient Rome, spices were used as a perfuming agent instead of as coloring. Throughout events such as the Crusades, the Islamic domination in Al-Andalus, and the commercial trades, the “Saracen connection” allowed Europe to assimilate Arab traditions and thus, incorporate colorful dishes to its cuisine.

This paper presents how and why colors are used in cuisine by examining the changes in the use of spices, especially saffron. There are cultural relations between colors and culinary preparations, and some colors have common patterns that are useful for understanding medieval mentalities and Arab medical influences.

“Die Familie der Baumkuchen (The Baumkuchen Family)” is a pioneering treatise on the evolution of Baumkuchen, written by Fritz Hahn in 1964. In this paper, Hahn traced the origins of Baumkuchen back to a method of baking over direct heat by rotating a cylindrical spit, and divided the evolution of Baumkuchen into five phases, from Ancient Greece to the first half of the 18th century when Baumkuchen was perfected as a form of confectionary. However, in his study, he focused only on changes in the forms of the batter and failed to mention recipes that existed from the 16th century onward. This paper closely examines the typical recipes for spit-baked confectionary developed from the 16th to 18th centuries and reconsiders the evolutional process of Baumkuchen in light of these new findings.

The purpose of this research is to compare the development of overseas Sichuan cuisine with the food globalization by a case study of the Sichuan Restaurant in Japan and the Red Chili Sichuan Restaxirant in Australia. In this research, I focused on one branch of the Sichuan Restaurant in Hiroshima from April to August 2016, and in June 2017. Also, I investigated in two restaurant branches of the Red Chili Sichuan Restaurant at both Brisbane and Sydney in Australia during October 2017. In those investigations, I did participant observations and interviews with managers and chefs in those restaurants. As a result, I hypothesize that the Sichuan cuisine has been localized in Japan more than in Australia while the Sichuan cuisine in Australia is more similar to that in Sichuan at present. This is because both countries, Japan and Australia, have different social and cultural backgrounds for Sichuan cuisine.