How Chinese made Europeans in Poona love mustard leaves

Nineteenth-century Britain is often visualized as brown, black, white, and grey with air filled with smoke and dust.

- Chinmay Damle

The popular understanding of the era is largely monochrome, ignoring the chromatic revolution in Europe. The Victorians loved colours.

The craze for life in vivid colour was rife due to the arrival of industrially manufactured dyes by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and William Henry Perkin. It changed the way clothes were designed and worn, and walls were painted. It also changed the way Europeans ate, especially their greens.

What was truly remarkable was the accessibility and affordability of these colours for the working class. Women wore brightly coloured clothes as a mark of assertion. This cultural shift, however, was loathed by many who detested "garish", "loud", and "outrageously crude" clothes and food. The rainbow transformation inevitably created tension and backlash against the mass adoption of industrially manufactured colours. The fight between natural and artificial was the most bitter with the colour green. In the mid-nineteenth century, the toxic arsenic green was associated with aestheticism endorsed provocatively by the likes of poet-playwright Oscar Wilde. It was a symbol of decadence and chicness.

Victorian Britain witnessed rapid urbanisation which resulted in a shortage of food in the growing cities. As a result, food merchants resorted to adulteration to save costs. They also made efforts to make the food more attractive by using newly invented synthetic dyes. Fresh fruits and vegetables were seasonal and often hard to obtain. Colouring them masked their staleness.

The mid-Victorians' love for colourful food was aided by the lackadaisical attitude towards the safety of what they ate. Green vegetables were routinely dyed with verdigris, an attractive blue-green colour that occurred naturally as a patina on copper or brass. Several cookbook authors like the formidable Mrs Isabella Beeton instructed readers on how to make their own food dyes with ingredients like verdigris, vinegar, and alum.