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Colouring
Brown.-It is a very usual practice with common cooks to make the brown colouring as it is wanted by burning a little sugar in an iron spoon, and stirring it into the soup or sauce. By this means the flavour is almost sure to be spoilt. Much the better plan is to make a little browning, and keep it stored for use. It will keep for years. Proceed as follows:--Crush a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar to powder, put it into a saucepan with a table-spoonful of water, and stir it unceasingly over a gentle fire, with a wooden spoon, until it begins to acquire a little colour. Draw it back and bake it very slowly, still stirring it, until it is almost black, without being in the least burnt. It will take about half an hour. Pour a quart of water over it, let it boil for a few minutes until the sugar is quite dissolved, pour it out, and when cold strain it into a bottle, and store it for use. A table-spoonful of this browning will colour half a pint of liquid, and there will be no danger of an unpleasant taste being given to the sauce, etc. The addition of a little claret or mushroom ketchup will often impart as much colouring to sauces as is required. When it is wished to thicken the sauce as well as colour it, brown thickening should be used. Green.-Pound some young spinach or beet-leaves. Press out the juice and put it in a cup. Place this cup in a saucepan of boiling water and let it simmer gently, to take off the raw taste of the juice. Before using it, mix with it a little finely-sifted sugar. Red.-Two or three drops of cochineal will impart a beautiful red or pink colouring. It can be made at home, and will not cost nearly so much as if bought at the shops. White.-Use pounded almonds, arrowroot, or cream. Yellow.-For a clear yellow, dissolve orange or lemon jelly. For an opaque, pound the yolks of eggs, and mix it with the liquid; or, add a little saffron; or, soak the flowers of the crocus, which will not taste.
A reference entry rather than a dish: five household colourings, of which the brown caramel is the only one still genuinely worth making. One line in the yellow section is dangerous and is dealt with first.
- The crocus"The flowers of the crocus" is the problem. Meadow saffron, Colchicum autumnale, is widely called autumn crocus and contains colchicine, for which there is no antidote and no safe culinary dose; ornamental garden crocus corms and flowers are also not food. Culinary saffron is the dried stigma of Crocus sativus only, and no home identification of a flower should stand between the two. Treat that clause as unusable and disregard it.
- Cochineal at homeNineteenth-century "making it at home" meant grinding dried cochineal insects and steeping them with alum and cream of tartar, sometimes with ammonia. The colour itself is still in use as carmine, but it is a known allergen for a small number of people, and the historic domestic preparations involved caustics that no longer belong in a kitchen.
- The browning, in numbersA quarter pound of loaf sugar is about 115 g, the quart of water about 1.1 litres in Imperial measure. Yield is roughly a litre of dark colouring, and a tablespoon tints half a pint (285 ml) of liquid.
- The hinge"Almost black, without being in the least burnt" is the entire skill. Caramel passes through a narrow window in the region of 180-200C before it turns acrid; past that the colouring carries bitterness into every sauce it touches, which is precisely the fault the author attributes to burning sugar in a spoon at the last minute.
- "Bake it very slowly"Most likely means keeping it barely cooking over the lowest possible heat, drawn to the side of the range, rather than putting it in an oven; the instruction to go on stirring points that way. A heavy pan and a wooden spoon still apply.
- Adding the waterPouring a quart of cold water onto sugar at that temperature spatters violently and sets solid for a moment. Warm the water, add it in stages, and stand back; the lump will dissolve as it boils.
- Keeping"It will keep for years" is optimistic: a quarter pound of sugar in a full quart of water is dilute enough that mould can start. Bottle it clean and refrigerate.
- Green and whiteSpinach or beet-leaf juice heated gently sets its proteins and clarifies; the pinch of sugar masks the vegetal note. Both fade badly with prolonged cooking, so add at the end. For white, arrowroot gives opacity without flavour where pounded almonds would not.
- Yellow"Dissolve orange or lemon jelly" most probably means a sweetened gelatin jelly rather than marmalade, though a clear fruit jelly is also possible. Saffron remains the reliable route: a small pinch of threads steeped in hot liquid.
Colouring entries like this one belong to a period when a cook's reputation rested partly on appearance, and when brown sauces, glazes and soups were expected to be a deep, even mahogany that meat stock alone rarely produced. Burnt-sugar caramel, sold commercially as "browning" or "Parisian essence", was the standard answer, and the author's objection to burning sugar in an iron spoon to order is a practical one: a small quantity scorches almost instantly and carries that bitterness straight into the pot. The vegetable colours are older still, descending from the medieval and early modern practice of tinting dishes with spinach juice, saffron, sandalwood and cochineal, colours that in grander households once signalled expense as much as prettiness. Cochineal itself, made from a scale insect farmed in Mexico and later the Canaries, had been a costly import since the sixteenth century; by the late nineteenth century it was cheap enough that the book can treat it as an economy to prepare at home, and it was already being displaced in commercial use by the coal-tar dyes that would dominate the following century.