Amaranth

To-morrow, oh, to-morrow, / In pastures green, where living waters swell, / And feed that fruitful tree, / We'll find the amaranth and asphodel, / There Mary's peerless lilies blossom well.

[…] Chrysanthemum coronarium, L. (hao-ts‘ai (蒿菜), and an amaranth (Amarantus gangeticus, L.), hsien-ts‘ai (莧菜), are cultivated for the sake of their leaves.

[A]s she stood by the grilled entrance waiting for an answer to the message on her card, she might have been looking into Hollywood. The bizarre débris of some recent picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as basketballs, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochthonous as the pale amaranth, mimosa, cork oak, or dwarfed pine.

Such vegetable amarants have a fair content of protein and are rich in Vitamins A and C, as well as in minerals; but they contain also slight amounts of anti-nutritional factors, especially oxalates and nitrates. These leaf-producing amarants are adapted to many different ecological environments.

While seabeach amaranth is a fugitive annual, its habitat requirements are known; it is found on sandy ocean beaches, where its primary habitat consists of overwash flats at accreting ends of islands and the sparsely vegetated zone between the high-tide line and the toe of the primary dune on non-eroding beaches. This narrow habitat niche for seabeach amaranth is bounded by its relative intolerance of flooding in lower beach settings and competition with other plants in upper beach and dune settings.

[F]rom the mixture of blue and ſcarlet are form'd amaranth, violet, and panſy; from the ſame mixture of blue and crimſon red are form'd the columbine or dove Colour, purple, crimſon, amaranth, panſy and crimſon violet.

Almost all the specimens [of stamps] with this watermark are perforated. They are—the amaranth penny with two florets and two letters; the same with four letters, whatever the value of the minute figure at the sides; and the current penny with four letters, deep amaranth colour.

Cotton stuff mordanted with alumina alone takes an amaranth, red or violet rose red colour. […] Amaranth, red, bluish rose, poppy, and scarlet are the colours prepared by the dyer with ordinary cochineal. Ammoniacal cochineal gives amaranth colours, and is employed in combination with many other colours.

As a colour, too, amaranth has gone to a decline. It was well enough known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make it into both dictionaries and fashion reports. […] Time, sadly, has given the lie to Aesop: the rose’s beauty is as beloved as ever, while amaranth’s fortunes have withered.

Amaranth, the most common red food colour in both the US and UK, was banned last week in the US after a study suggested that it caused cancer in rats. […] The situation is confused, however, because the test rats were mixed up with the controls in the US tests, and because some tests have indicated hazards while similar tests show the dye to be safe. In April 1975, the joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) gave amaranth temporary approval through 1978.

Amaranth is a red azo-dye with the chemical name trisodium 2-hydroxyl-1-(4-sulfonato-1-naphthylazo)naphthalene-3,6-disulfonate […]. Amaranth appears to be relatively unstable in solution and in processed food. Biscuits containing Amaranth showed a loss of 39–45% promoted by the use of baking soda, sucrose, and dextrose. The degradation of Amaranth may lead to the presence of naphthenic acid equivalent to the loss of Amaranth.

They [the Aztecs] considered the plant sacred and it played a key role in many rituals. The Catholic Spaniards were particularly disturbed by the practice of mixing a little blood from human sacrifices into amaranth dough, baking it into cakes which were then broken up and eaten by the faithful. […] In the nineteenth century there were reports of rosaries being made out of the stuff, and popped amaranth, mixed with honey, is still used to make a sweet called alegria ('happiness') in Mexico.