Home › The Principles of Cookery › Caramel, or Burnt Sugar
Caramel, or Burnt Sugar
Put a quarter of a pound of finely-sifted sugar into a preserving-pan, place it on a moderate fire, and stir it with a wooden spoon till it becomes liquid; then stir it constantly until it is a dark brown. Add one pint of cold water. Draw it to the side of the fire, and let it simmer very gently for a quarter of an hour longer. Strain, and bottle for use. If the fire is too fierce, the caramel will be discoloured. This browning should be added to the sauce the last thing. Time, forty minutes. Probable cost, 1d. per pint. When wanted, pour a few drops at a time into the tureen until the colour is what is required.
This is gravy browning — a bottle of dark, barely sweet caramel kept on hand to colour soups and sauces, not a confection. The whole thing hinges on taking the sugar past the point most cooks stop at, then handling the water addition safely.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of sugar is about 1/2 cup (c.115 g); a pint is 20 fl oz in this British book, so roughly 2 1/2 US cups. The book costs the result at a penny a pint, so it assumes something close to a pint of finished browning; a short gentle simmer will lose a little to evaporation and straining.
- "Finely-sifted sugar"In practice a fine-grained sugar put through a sieve to break up lumps so it melts evenly; caster or superfine is the nearest modern equivalent. Ordinary granulated works but melts less uniformly; sift it anyway.
- The panA preserving pan is a wide, heavy, unlined copper or brass basin. Any heavy-bottomed stainless saucepan of similar width does the job — a light pan will scorch the sugar in patches.
- "Dark brown" means darker than you thinkFor browning the sugar is taken well past amber to a deep, bitter brown with little sweetness left. Stop too early and you get a syrup that sweetens the sauce instead of merely colouring it; but note the recipe's own warning against pushing it so hard that it discolours.
- Adding the waterCold water hitting sugar at around 350°F erupts violently in steam and spitting caramel. Take the pan off the heat, stand back, wear long sleeves, and pour the water down the side of the pan in a slow stream. Warm water reduces the reaction but does not eliminate it.
- Moderate fireMedium heat, and the warning about a fierce fire is sound — hot spots carbonise the sugar and give a muddy, bitter result rather than a clean dark colour.
- The simmerFifteen minutes of gentle simmering dissolves the hardened caramel that sets when the water goes in and reduces the liquid a little. An occasional stir helps it along, though the recipe does not call for one.
- Adding it to a dishThe instruction to add it last is the point of the recipe. Colour is judged by eye against the finished sauce, a few drops at a time, and boiling it in early will only deepen the burnt note.
- KeepingBottled and capped it keeps well for a long time, since there is nothing perishable in it; it is not, however, a sugar-preserved syrup - the sugar is dilute and largely burnt - so check it for mould before use and keep it cool if you have thinned it further.
Browning of this kind was a staple of the nineteenth-century professional and upper-middle-class kitchen, where a rich brown gravy was expected of a well-made sauce. Cassell's treats it as a workshop preparation, made in quantity and kept in a bottle on the shelf beside the anchovy essence and the mushroom ketchup. The recipe's costing at a penny a pint tells you why it survived: colour that would otherwise demand long reduction of good stock could be had for almost nothing. The caramel colouring listed on modern gravy granules and dark sauces appears to descend from much the same idea. What is known as plain caramel, or E150a, is generally described as being made by heating sugar in essentially this way.