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Candies and Candy Making: Color
It is customary with confectioners to associate certain coloring with certain flavoring. Almond or pistachio cream are usually tinted green. Orange or lemon flavoring are tinted with those colors. Rose is tinted pink. A good way to obtain suggestions for producing tasteful and artistic effects is to study the display in a good candy shop and imitate what you like best. - Care To Color Confectionery. must, of course, be taken in coloring confectionery not to use aniline dyes, mineral pigments, lakes, or any other substance of a poisonous nature.
The animal and vegetable dyestuffs are usually harmless in small quantities, but the following combinations are especially recommended:
To Color Red. -Cover 1 ounce of cochineal with pint of boiling water and boil about 5 minutes. Stir in 1 ounce of cream of tartar, ounce of powdered alum, and continue boiling about 10 minutes. Test by letting a few drops fall on a piece of clean white paper. If the color is not sufficiently clear and bright, boil a little longer. When done, stir in 2 ounces of granulated sugar and put up in a stoppered glass bottle for use.
To Color Blue. - Dissolve a little indigo stone in warm water and test with a few drops on a piece of white paper. Continue to add more indigo until the color is bright and clear.
To Color Yellow. - Dissolve a little gamboge in warm water, or the heart of a yellow lily with warm water, until the bright tint is produced. Or steep ounce of saffron in soft water for 24 hours or more until the proper tint is obtained.
Or for small quantities, a good pinch of saffron in a spoonful of water may be boiled until the water is nearly evaporated. Squeeze out the juice through cheese cloth. This color is an orange yellow, and a few drops will go a long way.
To Color Green. -Cover fresh spinach leaves with boiling water and let stand two or three minutes, or until the color is as strong as desired.
Cork tightly to exclude the air.
Or steep ounce of saffron in soft water for 24 hours and steep separately ¼ ounce of indigo carmine for the same length of time. Mix the two for use. This mixture can be preserved for considerable time by adding clarified sirup and preserving in a closely stoppered glass vessel. a Or for a larger quantity, wash a peck of fresh green spinach very carefully in several waters to remove all grit, and while dripping wet pound it with a suitable mallet or any piece of hard wood, to a soft pulp. Place this pulp in several thicknesses of cheese cloth and wring out the juice, which may be done by twisting the ends of the cloth by means of short sticks or rods. Place the juice over a gentle fire until it begins to curdle or thicken. Strain off the water through a piece of cheese cloth, leaving the thick part of the spinach juice on the cloth. This is the vegetable green or spinach green for confectioners. Care must be taken in drying substances colored with this material, as if the heat is too strong it is likely to take on a yellowish cast.
This is a confectioner's palette rather than a single sweet: five ways to tint candy, drawn from the dyestuffs a household could buy at a drugstore around 1900. Two of them have no place in food, and the page as a whole predates any legal standard for what could be sold as a coloring.
- Gamboge is a poison, not a food colorThe yellow gum resin of Garcinia trees is a drastic purgative and was used as such in nineteenth-century medicine; ingested doses cause violent vomiting and diarrhoea, and larger amounts have been fatal. It survived in this book as a pigment because it was cheap, bright and sold openly by druggists for varnish and watercolor work. It is the single reason this page cannot be followed.
- "Indigo stone" is not indigo carmineThe text uses the two names loosely, but they are different materials. Indigo stone is the raw natural dye cake sold for laundry bluing and textile work, of unknown purity and liable to adulteration; indigo carmine is the sulfonated derivative, which does exist as a permitted food color today but only in a food-grade grade that a general store would not have supplied.
- Alum in the redCream of tartar and alum are mordants here, fixing the cochineal and brightening it from crimson toward scarlet. Potassium alum was a normal kitchen article then, used in pickling and baking powder, but the quantity in the original has not survived legibly, and unmeasured alum is not something to boil into a syrup you will eat.
- Cochineal itself is still with usThe insect-derived red of the first paragraph is the ancestor of the carmine and cochineal extract still listed on ingredient labels. It is a genuine food color, though a known allergen for a small number of people, and it is the one dyestuff on this page that the modern industry kept.
- The spinach green is the sound ideaBlanching or pounding spinach and cooking the strained juice until the green protein curdles out is the classic vert d' y work work work... [use:] Blanching or pounding spinach and cooking the strained juice until the green protein curdles out is the classic vert d'"epinard of French pastry work, and the warning at the end is the real hinge: the chlorophyll turns olive and then yellow-brown under heat, so anything tinted with it must be dried gently. A peck is a large, bulky quantity of leaf -- several pounds -- and yields only a small amount of paste.
- SaffronThe saffron directions are unobjectionable in themselves and the note that a few drops go a long way is accurate. What is missing is the weight; every fractional measure on this page has been lost, so no quantity here can be relied on.
- Use current colors insteadCertified food dyes and modern plant-based colorings, sold in liquid, gel and powder form, do the whole of what this page attempts and are made to a purity standard. For tinting candy today, work from a current recipe and a current product.
Household Discoveries appeared at the moment American food coloring was changing hands. Through the nineteenth century confectioners tinted sweets with whatever was bright, and the results were sometimes lethal: chrome yellow, red lead, copper salts and Scheele's green all turned up in cheap candy, and periodic poisoning scandals in Britain and the United States kept the subject in the newspapers. The warning here against "aniline dyes, mineral pigments, lakes, or any other substance of a poisonous nature" is the household reflex that grew out of those scandals, and it is honest as far as it goes, although the author's own list of safe alternatives shows how little chemistry was behind the reassurance that "animal and vegetable dyestuffs are usually harmless." The Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 began the process of certifying a short list of permitted coal-tar colors, which over the following decades displaced the drugstore dyepot entirely. The advice to study a good candy shop window and copy what you like is a reminder that confectionery was then a display trade first: shop-window pyramids of tinted creams and pulled sugar were the advertisement, and the home cook was being invited to imitate a professional's eye rather than follow a formula.