Caramel
Place in a saucepan over the fire two large tablespoonfuls of sugar, a pinch of salt. Stir constantly until it is of a very dark brown, then pour in two teaspoonfuls of water. Continue to stir, adding slowly two small teacups of water, being very careful to see that the sugar is all thoroughly dissolved. This makes a very pretty coloring. Half of this quantity may be made.
This is browning liquid — burnt-sugar colouring used to darken soups, gravies and sauces before bottled gravy browning was on every shelf. It is simple, but the two danger points are the smoke stage and the moment the water goes in.
- The hinge: take it further than looks comfortable"very dark brown" means the sugar has gone past ordinary caramel to near-black and is smoking lightly. The recipe gives no temperature, and you judge it by eye and smell. Stop while it is amber and the result will sweeten the soup instead of colouring it; properly burnt caramel is bitter, not sweet, which is exactly what you want in a broth.
- Adding the waterMolten sugar is well above the boiling point of water, so the first two teaspoonfuls will erupt in steam and spatter. Take the pan off the heat, stand back, add the water at arm's length, then return it to a low flame to dissolve the hardened lumps. Long sleeves and a long-handled spoon are sensible.
- TeacupsA teacup in a book of this date is not a modern 8-oz measuring cup; period equivalences run anywhere from a gill (4 fl oz) to about 6 fl oz, and the recipe asks for *small* teacups. Reckon on somewhere between a cup and a cup and a half of water in total. The exact figure barely matters here; thinner colouring simply means using more of it.
- Two large tablespoonfulsCall it a generous 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar, roughly 25-30 g. The recipe scales down cleanly, as the text says, though a very small quantity of sugar burns unevenly in a wide pan -- use the smallest heavy saucepan you have.
- Pan choiceA light or nonstick pan is a poor choice for sugar this dark; you cannot judge the colour against a black surface and the coating will not thank you. Stainless steel or a light-coloured heavy saucepan lets you read the colour against the metal.
- Yield and useYou will end with roughly a cup of thin, near-black syrup. A teaspoon or two darkens a quart of stock or gravy; add it a little at a time, since colour cannot be taken back out.
- Keeping itCooled and bottled, keep it in the refrigerator. Note that this is a dilute syrup, not a preserving-strength one, so it is not self-preserving: check it for mould and make it in small batches.
Burnt-sugar colouring was a standard piece of kitchen equipment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, kept in a bottle beside the vinegar and drawn on whenever a consommé, a brown sauce or a Christmas cake looked pallid. Clear brown soups were judged largely on colour, and stock made from pale bones or too little browned meat produced a broth that tasted right and looked wrong. Commercially the same substance became caramel colour, still the most widely used food dye in the world and the thing that darkens cola and much bottled gravy browning today. Cooks of the period also called it "blackjack" or simply "browning"; recipes for it appear in English household manuals well back into the 1700s.