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Wine Browning, for Flavouring and Colouring Gravies
Dissolve an ounce of fresh butter in a small saucepan, and stir into it a quarter of a pound of powdered white sugar. As soon as it begins to colour draw it to the side, and stir into it very gradually a pint of good port. Pour it into a fresh saucepan, and put with it six cloves, twelve peppercorns, three minced shallots, one blade of mace, one inch of stick cinnamon, the thin rind of a lemon; a wine-glassful of mushroom ketchup, and a little salt. Stir the mixture over a gentle fire for ten minutes, strain it into a basin, let it get cold, skim it, and bottle for use. Time, ten minutes to simmer the sauce. Sufficient, a few drops will pleasantly flavour and colour half a pint of gravy.
This is a Victorian browning, the bottled ancestor of gravy browning and caramel colouring: burnt sugar for depth of colour, port and spice for flavour. It keeps well and a few drops go a long way.
- The hinge is the caramelThe recipe says to draw the pan aside as soon as the sugar begins to colour, so this is a light caramel rather than a dark one. Taken too far it turns bitter, and the browning will make a gravy taste scorched rather than rich.
- Adding the portMolten sugar and cold wine spit violently. Draw the pan well off the heat and add the port a spoonful at a time at first, stirring; the caramel will seize into lumps and then redissolve as it warms through.
- A wine-glassfulIn this period a wine-glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (roughly 60 ml, about a quarter cup), though the measure was not standardised.
- Mushroom ketchupNot tomato ketchup. This is the thin, black, intensely savoury liquor of salted mushrooms, still sold by a few British makers; a good mushroom soy or a dark Worcestershire-style sauce carries a similar salt-and-glutamate load.
- A blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril from a nutmeg. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, though it will cloud the sauce and needs finer straining.
- Lemon rind"Thin rind" means pared with a knife or peeler, no white pith, which turns the keeping sauce bitter over weeks in the bottle.
- Gentle fireA bare simmer for the ten minutes. Boiling drives off the port's aromatics and leaves you with sweetened caramel.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a pint (about 570 ml), enough to colour a great many gravies. It is sugar- and alcohol-heavy and should keep well, but bottle it clean and keep it refrigerated.
- Using itA few drops at a time, stirred into finished gravy off the boil, tasting as you go. Because it is sweet, it will show up quickly in a lightly seasoned sauce.
Browning was a standing item in nineteenth-century kitchens, where a pale gravy was thought a failure. The technique itself is simply caramelisation: sugar cooked past the point of sweetness until it turns brown and faintly bitter, which is the same principle behind the caramel colour still listed on bottled gravy and brown sauces today. What marks this particular version as an ambitious household recipe rather than a plain colouring is the port and the spice cabinet behind it — cloves, mace, cinnamon, shallots and mushroom ketchup, the last a staple English store sauce made from salted mushrooms, which was in time displaced by commercial bottled sauces. Keeping a bottle of something like this on the shelf meant a cook could rescue the colour and savour of a weak gravy at a moment's notice.