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Browning for Sauces
1 cup sugar 1 small onion 1 small carrot 1½ cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon salt Chop the onion fine, and cut the carrot into dice. Cook the carrot and one-half the onion in the boiling water. Melt the sugar in an aluminum or iron pan, letting it cook until it smokes and turns deep brown in color. Add the uncooked onion. Take from the fire. Add the boiling water, vegetables, pepper and salt. Cook slowly five minutes. Strain, cool, and bottle for use. By many people a little parsley, and celery seed are liked for additional flavor. If used, they are cooked in the boiling water. ИTATЯЗO HTIW OT na •
This is gravy browning — a burnt-sugar colouring and flavouring kept bottled by the stove, not a sauce to serve on its own. The whole thing hinges on how far you take the caramel and how you handle the water that goes into it.
- Take the sugar past sweetDry sugar melted alone should go to a deep mahogany and just begin to smoke, roughly 355-370F. That is the point where sweetness burns off and you get colour and a faint bitterness; stopping at amber gives you a sweet syrup that will make gravy taste of candy.
- The water will eruptAdding 1 1/2 cups of boiling liquid to sugar at caramel temperature throws steam and spitting syrup out of the pan. The instruction to take it from the fire first is not optional. Use a deep pan, add the water in small amounts down the side, and keep your hand and face clear.
- Why aluminum or ironThe original specifies these but gives no reason; thin tinned or enamelled pans of the period would have been the likely alternatives, and neither takes caramel heat well. A heavy stainless or cast-iron saucepan does the job now; aluminum will discolour slightly from the caramel but takes no harm.
- The raw onion added off the sugarHalf the onion goes into the hot caramel instead of the water, taking the sugar's flavour directly; the recipe does not explain why. Since the pan comes from the fire straight after, expect a hiss and some sticking rather than long browning; the water loosens it and the straining removes it.
- StrainingStrain through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth. Onion or carrot solids left in the bottle will spoil sooner than the strained liquid.
- Yield and useAbout 1 1/2 cups. A teaspoon or two darkens and deepens a pale gravy or brown sauce; more than that and the caramel's bitterness shows. Season the dish after adding it, since the browning already carries salt and pepper.
- Storage, not as writtenA dilute vegetable-and-sugar liquid with no acid and no preservative is not shelf stable, whatever "bottle for use" meant in a pantry of the period. Keep it in the refrigerator and treat it as a few weeks' supply, or freeze it in an ice-cube tray.
- The garbled line at the endThe reversed characters at the close are stray mirrored text picked up in transcription, not part of the recipe.
Bottled "browning" was a fixture of the professional and ambitious domestic kitchen from the nineteenth century onward, sold commercially under names like Kitchen Bouquet, Parisian essence and gravy browning, and made at home by cooks who wanted the colour without the price. Most work the same way: sugar taken well past the caramel stage until its sweetness is destroyed, then let down with liquid. The point was cosmetic as much as culinary -- a brown sauce or gravy was judged on depth of colour, and stock made from pale meat or thickened with a light roux looked thin and unappetising on the plate. This version, with its onion, carrot and optional parsley and celery seed, is a savoury browning rather than a plain burnt-sugar syrup, and it assumes a household that kept a few flavouring bottles ready. Commercial browning largely displaced the homemade kind as bouillon cubes and bottled sauces spread through the mid-twentieth century.