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Caramel
Burn 1 C sugar in an iron saucepan until a blue smoke arises from it. Add ½ C boiling water. Stir sugar while it is melting. Mrs. Chas. H. Kaiser.
This is not a candy but caramel syrup — the dark, bitter-edged flavoring and coloring that older kitchens kept in a bottle for cakes, puddings and gravies. One cup of sugar yields roughly two-thirds of a cup of syrup.
- The hinge: the blue smoke"Burn" is literal here. The sugar is taken well past golden, to the point where wisps of acrid smoke rise and the color is very dark. Stopping at amber gives you a sweet syrup with little depth; it is the bitterness developed at this late stage that makes the syrup useful as a flavoring and coloring.
- C means cupCommunity cookbooks of this period abbreviate freely: 1 C sugar is one cup, ½ C boiling water is half a cup.
- Melt dry, then wetThe instruction to stir while melting most likely refers to the dry sugar in the pan, though the wording is ambiguous. Once the water goes in, swirl over low heat until the hardened lumps dissolve.
- Add the water off the heat, at arm's lengthBoiling water hitting sugar at around 350F erupts violently and throws steam and molten syrup. Pull the pan off the burner, pour the water down the side, and stand back. Cold water is worse, not better, because it makes the sugar seize into a solid mass.
- Why the iron panA heavy pan holds steady heat, which matters when sugar is taken this far. Any heavy-bottomed stainless or enameled pan works. A light-colored interior helps you judge the color, which is otherwise guesswork.
- Storage and useBottle it once cool and keep it stoppered. It keeps for a long while, though a syrup this dilute is not indefinitely shelf-stable. Use it a teaspoon at a time to color and deepen gravies, gingerbread, and dark cakes, or to tint a boiled frosting.
Before commercial gravy browning and bottled caramel color were on every grocer's shelf, this was the household version of both. "Caramel" in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks often meant this burnt-sugar syrup rather than the chewy candy the word now brings to mind, and a cake recipe calling for "one tablespoon caramel" is asking for this, not for a confection. The commercial descendant is caramel color, still one of the most widely used food colorings in the world, and still made by the same principle of heating sugar past the point of sweetness. The recipe's brevity is typical of community cookbooks, which recorded proportions for cooks already familiar with the process.