Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sugar, Coloured
Sugar, Coloured
Crush some lump sugar coarsely. Drop a little prepared cochineal upon the palms of the hands, and rub the sugar between them till it is equally coloured. Put it in a warm place, and when dry it will be ready for use. Spinach-juice may be used to colour the sugar green, and an infusion of saffron to colour it yellow. Chocolate will impart a brown tint, and a little indigo a blue tint. Pink sugar-candy is very pretty for ornamenting cakes and sweet dishes.
A decorator's preparation rather than a dish: crushed lump sugar tinted by hand with whatever colouring the still-room had. Three of the four colourings are foods; the fourth is not, and that is the problem.
- The indigo is the reason to stopIndigo in a Victorian household usually meant dyestuff or laundry blue, sold for linen rather than for eating. Nineteenth-century "blue" was variously indigo dye, Prussian blue (an iron-cyanide pigment) or ultramarine, none of them food-grade and none subject to any purity standard. Only the sulphonated derivative, indigo carmine, was later admitted as a food colour, and the recipe gives no reason to think that is what is meant here.
- Cochineal, by contrast, is still in use"Prepared cochineal" was a liquid extract of the dried cochineal insect, sold ready-made by chemists and grocers. The same pigment survives as carmine or cochineal extract on modern labels, which is why some pink sweets are not vegetarian.
- Lump sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone or loaf and broken up with nippers; "lump sugar" is the broken pieces, roughly what a sugar cube gives you today. "Crushed coarsely" means a gritty sanding-sugar texture, not a powder.
- Spinach green and saffron yellowGreen came from spinach juice pressed from the raw leaf, sometimes heated to set the chlorophyll into a paste the French called vert d'épinards. Saffron infused in a little hot water gives yellow; both fade badly in light and neither keeps.
- Rubbing it between the palmsThe point of the hands is friction and even distribution with almost no added liquid, since wet sugar dissolves and cakes. It also puts skin contact into the process, another reason the indigo instruction should not be followed.
- "A warm place"The airing cupboard, the plate rack or the cooling range, not an oven. The sugar wants to dry slowly and gently, or it clumps.
- Pink sugar-candySugar-candy is sugar recrystallised from syrup into large hard crystals, a different product from the crushed loaf sugar above. The final sentence reads as an aside about its use in garnishing rather than a further step, though the book does not say which product it means.
- If you want coloured sugarUse a current recipe with a colouring sold for food.
Coloured sugars belonged to the confectioner's and still-room maid's end of the kitchen, where the same handful of tinctures — cochineal, spinach, saffron, chocolate, and various blues — coloured jellies, ices, icings and sugar-plums alike. Cassell's is writing in the decades just after Britain's first food adulteration legislation, prompted in part by the Bradford lozenge poisoning of 1858, when arsenic was mixed into sweets in place of a harmless bulking powder; mineral pigments containing lead, copper and arsenic were repeatedly found in confectionery through the middle of the century. That context makes the casual inclusion of indigo here telling: a household book could still list a dyer's material alongside spinach juice without comment, because the line between the colour box and the larder had only just begun to be drawn.