Caramel
Put in a stewpan one teacup nice brown sugar and half a teacup water. Stew over a hot fire till it burns a little. If too thick, make it of the consistency of thin molasses, by adding a little boiling water. Bottle and cork, ready for use.--Mrs. J. W. II.
Caramel Ice Cream.
Three quarts cream, two pints brown sugar, put in a skillet and stir constantly over a brisk fire until it is dissolved. Be careful not to let it burn, however. While it is melting, heat one pint milk, and stir a little at a time with the dissolved sugar. Then strain it, and when cool, pour it into the cream, well beaten. Then freeze.--Mrs. W. C. R.
Two recipes in one entry: a burnt-sugar syrup kept bottled as a colouring and flavouring, and an eggless caramel ice cream that uses brown sugar rather than the burnt syrup. Both are workable, but the measures are loose and the second one is enormous.
- The teacupA nineteenth-century teacup is not a standard cup; it is usually reckoned at somewhere between a gill and 6 fl oz. Read as about 6 fl oz, the first recipe is roughly 3/4 cup sugar to a scant 6 tablespoons water. The exact ratio matters little, since the water boils off before the sugar colours.
- The hinge: adding water to hot caramelSugar that has "burned a little" is well above 340F. Pouring boiling water into it will erupt violently and set off a cloud of steam. Pull the pan off the heat first, stand back, add the water a spoonful at a time down the side of the pan, then return it to low heat to redissolve any hardened lumps.
- What "burns a little" meansTake it to a dark mahogany with a distinct bitter smell, just short of black smoke. Underdone caramel colouring tastes only of sweet sugar and will not do its job in a gravy or a soup.
- "Brisk fire"High heat throughout, but the syrup goes from amber to acrid in seconds at the end. Watch it by colour rather than by clock, and have the boiling water ready before you start.
- Keeping the bottled syrupCorked in a clean bottle it keeps for months at room temperature; the sugar concentration does the preserving. If it sets stiff in cold weather, stand the bottle in warm water rather than reboiling it.
- The ice cream is unmeasured sugarThe ice cream's sugar is measured by volume -- Two pints of brown sugar is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 lb depending on how hard it is packed. Melted dry over a brisk fire it will scorch easily; a heavy pan, medium heat and constant stirring are the whole of the technique. Adding the hot milk a little at a time, as directed, keeps the sugar from seizing into a solid mass.
- No eggs, so no custard stepThis is a Philadelphia-style base: nothing here needs cooking beyond dissolving the sugar. Chill the mixture thoroughly before churning, or the machine will not freeze it.
- Yield and scaleThree quarts of cream plus a pint of milk makes close to a gallon of finished ice cream, enough for twenty-five or more. That suits a hand-cranked freezer packed in ice and rock salt; for a domestic machine, quarter the recipe. Eggless cream bases freeze hard, so serve within a few hours or temper 15 minutes before scooping.
"Caramel" in a book like this usually means the bottled burnt-sugar syrup rather than a confection: a dark, faintly bitter colouring kept on the shelf and used by the spoonful to deepen brown gravies, soups and sauces, the ancestor of the caramel colour still listed on gravy browning and cola labels. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first issued in 1878, with 1879 printings also in circulation) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives signed with initials only, which is why the page carries two unrelated caramel recipes signed by two different women and set one after the other with no editorial join. The ice cream is a reminder of what a Virginia household with a springhouse and an ice house could do in the decades after the hand-crank freezer became common: three quarts of cream churned at once, sweetened with brown sugar rather than the more expensive refined white.